Style

I remember that after prototyping a site targeted at 16-24 year old girls involved in social shopping, and showing them mockups with extra cool Google-like whitespace, they said, “Yuck. Too boring.” They wanted lots of colors and random stuff in the background.

Andrew’s stumbled across the design schism of today: Much of visual design has finally eked into great information design, but has also become extremely functional and has lost a great deal of real aesthetic charm. The majority of it now only appeals to interface designers and other visual designers. Just take a look at the web 2.0 parody tag on Flickr to see a sign of where we’ve bottomed out today.

We don’t have to design poorly, we just have to design for audiences. Too often we can get so wound up in the process itself that we begin to design for ourselves. So ugly design isn’t about wanting ugliness, but it is an active rejection of the sterile landscape of web design today.

BTW, Andrew: love the blog!