

How to Destroy the Web 2.0 Look. - pius
http://www.snap2objects.com/2007/11/20/how-to-destroy-the-web-20-look/

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joshwa
I dunno, these designs feel very "2001 ad agency microsite" to me. Nothing
post-web-2.0 about them, more like pre-web-2.0.

This is what happened when you take your best print designers and set them
loose on the web. How do you suppose those sites render once you much with
text size? Usability/web standards did not suddenly go out of vogue, did they?

Ooo, the original presentation has much more actual content:

[http://elliotjaystocks.com/blog/archive/2007/destroy-the-
web...](http://elliotjaystocks.com/blog/archive/2007/destroy-the-web-20-look-
future-of-web-design-new-york/)

~~~
oditogre
Looking at a couple of the examples and screwing with the text size a bit,
everything seems to work fine except extremely big text (which makes any page
look bad).

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jraines
The design elements he wants to see replace the web 2.0 look:

    
    
        * Retro-Vintage
        * Warm Dark Color Palette
        * Rich Textures
        * Grunge-Retro Fonts
        * Rough Edges
        * Ornaments
        * Stains
        * Rich Full Layered Headers
    

I can't stand most of these. And boucher is right, they're a lot harder to do
anyway.

I think the designs that appeal to me are minimally dressed up stuff, like
Hacker News and Socialmoth. And the appeal is not just the high data-ink
percentage, but the fact that it doesn't take that much coding to achieve, and
so is elegant conceptually as well as visually. It does take some thought and
skill though, as my own forays into web-design have shown me.

~~~
oditogre
>Grunge-Retro Fonts

I was actually thinking a lot of the examples had an almost steampunk vibe to
them. Others remind me of some of the music videos that came out in 2002 -
2005, when emo bands started playing with goth themes. I can't say I'm a fan
of the cluttered clip art look or the 'stains' / Rorschach inkblots, but a lot
of the other stuff I could really get behind. Reading dense text on bright
backgrounds really sucks after a while, and having a few rough edges or
variations in texture and colors keeps the eyes awake. I'd even be happy if
more sites went to having a slightly darker background in the areas where text
is like news.yc does (instead of solid white like Reddit).

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boucher
I think one of the reasons the "web 2.0 look" is popular is that it is fairly
easy to design. Basic photoshop skills and a little bit of aesthetics go a
long way.

retro-vintage, custom fonts, crazy edges and textures. These are all pretty
difficult for a novice. I tend to think most startups don't have a lot of time
or money to become or hire photoshop/design experts, and probably the majority
of hackers aren't experts either.

~~~
timr
Yeah...but the "geeks are bad with Photoshop" excuse doesn't explain the
proliferation of cliche design elements.

For example: it takes more work to generate a glossy bubble button than to
_not_ generate a glossy bubble button...but that doesn't seem to stop people
from overusing them.

~~~
boucher
Well, there are two contributors to this. One, there are online tutorials on
how to generate glossy bubble buttons, and similar effects (mainly, anything
Apple has ever done). And two, now there is a ____ generator for pretty much
ever element.

~~~
tlrobinson
[http://www.ajaxflakes.com/web-20/top-100-online-
generators-w...](http://www.ajaxflakes.com/web-20/top-100-online-generators-
web-20/)

I challenge someone to create a "web 2.0 generator generator". Or a generator
that uses these generators to generate a "web 2.0" site without any
interaction from the developer.

Not unlike the CS research paper generator that these guys wrote:
<http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/> Some of the papers were actually accepted
into conferences.

~~~
omouse
_I challenge someone to create a "web 2.0 generator generator"._

Psh easy. Just use some Lisp macros.

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Goladus
The web was not crowded "in the beginning" as the author says. Most of the
sites I visited used a lot of text with minimal markup and few images. Here's
a page I stumbled across that was obviously from the mid-90s (I was searching
for the URL in one of the links on this guy's site)

[http://www.rett.org/about/oldsites/rettsitev2/pages/links.ht...](http://www.rett.org/about/oldsites/rettsitev2/pages/links.html)

Good page design has _always_ been clean and focused. It doesn't have to look
like Web 2.0. <http://www.homestarrunner.com> is clean and focused. But it
doesn't look like Web 2.0 at all. Penny-Arcade looks cluttered at first
glance, except it's a gaming fansite and the flashy advertisements are part of
its style. Once that is considered, the site appears very clean and focused.
It's also not typical "Web 2.0" style. (<http://www.penny-
arcade.com/2007/11/21> "Facebookery")

Avoiding gratuitous decoration is just good design. Feel free to add as much
complexity as you can, just don't let it detract from the purpose of the site.

~~~
joshwa
That first page you linked to is from the "export bookmarks" function of (I
think?) Netscape 4...

~~~
Goladus
I'm not surprised. The point is that the web wasn't all cluttered like the
author implied. Most of it was just text.
<http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/debian-faq/index.en.html>

Much of the content I looked for were actual text files, maybe with some ASCII
art: <http://www.rpgamer.com/games/ff/ff4/info/ff4_monster.txt>

(incidentally, the original version of that ff4 file was not double-spaced.)

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snorkel
Yes, these vanity web sites are pretty but don't get carried away with
splattering the page with _design_. Remember that the average web surfer has
the attention span of a caffeinated squirrel and if you carpet bomb their
visual cortex with too much stuff, no matter how pretty it all may be, if a
web surfer doesn't immediately understand what they are looking at, they get
confused and turn away.

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jkush
This is interesting but not really accurate. If "A trend always appears as the
result of the opposition with another." was true, we'd be caught in a loop
between one extreme and the next.

It's partially right though. When it comes to "taste" there often seems to be
a severe reversal in a short amount of time. I like to think of it as a
correction. We're getting to the point now, where the web 2.0 look has reached
the extreme. It's time for a correction in "taste". The leading edge of
"taste" will snap back to something far from what's currently fashionable (I
say far because anything else wouldn't seem fresh) and the rest of us will
eventually follow.

Then it will happen all over again.

I think it's partially correct to say a new trend is "opposite" but more
accurate to say it's a reaction to how stale the current trend is.

In short, the Web 2.0 will certainly change (isn't that a given anyway?), but
I don't know that "grunge" is where we're headed.

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abstractbill
I'm not going to get behind any design trend that seem to want to replace more
and more text with images of text.

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marcus
I don't know about you but I like the minimalistic look.

And then again I thought that ncurses is a great UI :)

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cmars232
All of this and more would be feasible if there were better cross-browser
support for vector graphics.

These whimsical designs might be ok for niche markets, but they require
tedious Photoshop skills and they don't scale.

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jsmcgd
I agree that the sites shown are prettier but I'd argue that they are much
more of a visual work out. I think content is paramount, everything else is
secondary. Anything that gets between you and the content begins to grate and
should be removed.

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kn0thing
Fools. I think that blogger ought to watch this...

<http://youtube.com/watch?v=Isk88nT0sRY>

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edw519
"Mr Stocks also noted that what makes a site part of the web 2.0 is not its
looks, is the way it works."

The article should have ended here.

~~~
jsmcgd
Yeah, the rest of the article seems to contradict the beginning.

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alaskamiller
sounds like someone got a hold of this book: [http://www.amazon.com/Web-
Standards-Creativity-Innovations-S...](http://www.amazon.com/Web-Standards-
Creativity-Innovations-Scripting/dp/1590598032). It details how to develop
websites he's referring to, particularly DirtyPrettyThings.com done by Sam
Collision.

A lot of the elements are all pre-Web 2.0. Go to any Border's or B&N and find
a web design book printed in 99 and you'll find the very same styles he so
loves. The point of this article should have been: "How to determine if you
have taste?"

