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Whaddya think, kids? "Now that things like Readability and Instapaper are dissolving all the bells and whistles off of every other kind of content… it's worth asking whether or not what we've come to accept as good Web design accomplishes anything genuinely useful for a website's best customers—the ones who obsessively check it throughout the day, the ones who read every word of an article, the ones who are most engaged with a site's content."
Web pages should look as much as possible like the work I should actually be doing.
I've always wanted my favorite sites to include a selection of "office stealth" skin options, depending on what you're supposed to be doing.
Web design should be blingees.
NEEDS MORE FLASH INTRO
Blink-tags, dude.
I don't think it has to be bare-bones, but boy, I wish people still used the WIDTH and HEIGHT attributes in all their IMG tags, so that I didn't have to put up with stuff like this.
I mean, happens all over the Web, and is some 1996-level shit.
Is that why the site is too damn slow?
Oh, and on the topic of 1996-level shit, wasn't that the last time people cared about, let alone considered "a website's best customers– the ones who obsessively check it throughout the day, the ones who read every word of an article, the ones who are most engaged with a site's content?" I thought the invention of the Unique killed us off?
Yeah, ideally, at least back in the day (this may have changed since the Web got all fancy), your HTML code would tell your browser not just where to get images from but also what their dimensions were, so that if the place it was getting them from wasn't loading quickly (or at all), at least the browser could block out the necessary space and fill in text around it. (Otherwise, the browser has to load the whole image to find out how big it is, and none of the text that follows gets rendered until that happens.)
So, worst-case scenario, you would end up with blank spaces where your ads or images were, but at least the text would all be loaded and ready to read! I suppose, though, from a certain business perspective, maybe you don't want the editorial content there if people aren't seeing the ads too?
Anyway, either things have changed and I don't understand anymore (totally possible!), or even though this is something we've been able to do since the dawn of the mainstream Web, almost no one actually does it.
Text ads are the only ads!
Yes please. But I like most things that way (cocktails, linens, furniture, etc.) Plain, and good.
However! In a landscape where everything has equal value, visually, content is often not enough to separate your offering. This is why graphic design was invented. So, while the trend is in a distinctly anti-aesthetic direction, these things come and go in phases, and sooner or later, things will need to look "good" or "interesting" again to be noticed.
I love that that basic equation is \"design\"=\"ads.\"
Elephant in the room: the most successful tech company got rich off a utilitarian object with cosmetically improved interface and brushed metal skin.
I expect a little less fanboism here, but you never know, so unclench your panties and note that taken to its logic extreme, the argument linked to would have the iPhone interface as a command line.