05.02.09
Pixellated pragmatism

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I can’t really put my finger on when exactly. But at some point in the last 2 or 3 years, the web stopped being new and just started being, well, there. We all worked out what it did, took it into our lives and absorbed it into the everyday to, fro, hubble and bubble of the 21st century.

So now it’s become less important for a website to say HEY YOU LOOK AT ME, and much more important to say ‘what can I help you find?’ We use the web to find or read stuff, quickly. It hasn’t stopped us going to movies, watching TV, or reading books. It’s just added to these things. My tweenage son uploads movies of his guitar playing onto Facebook. My other half plays Tetris on her iPhone whilst we catch two month-old dramas recorded on a TVR, fast forwarding through old Xmas ads. Am I surprised? Not really.

But the implications of this are profound: not only for those producing those fast-forwarded ads, but for those designing online. Of course you can show off with some whiz-bang flash or video graphics, but the effect soon wears off. A few years ago the Habitat site was an award-winning, immersive, 3d environment. Now? It’s a site where you go to look at rugs. Or buy a chair. It works fine, of course, it’s got a retail job to do, but that’s it.

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Unveiling a huge, bells-and-whistles animated site is now unusual – the last agency site of note was Wieden and Kennedy’s impressive wk.com site last year, and hours can be spent lost in its spider diagram/timeline navigation.

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But, have you really got the time? Many will give it just ten minutes before frustration kicks in and they jump to one of Wieden’s (very good) blogs. Wieden’s London office are obviously equally frustrated, and this week launched their own site that just shows you their work, quickly.

Just for interest I revisited Leo Burnett’s gold-pencil-winning website this week, and once you’ve rung that bell and blown the whistle, it just seems a bit annoying.

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Many now argue for the polar opposite of the immersive animated approach. Partly driven by accessibility issues (ie ‘what does it look like with pictures and flash turned off?’), blogging (which needs page URL’s in order to link to something) and good old fashioned speed, sites get simpler and simpler. If you’re wondering why so many look like weblogs, it’s because they’re often adapted from blog software.

So much can be hosted on photography and video sites that the US creative agency Modernista skipped the idea of a hosted site altogether and simply placed a tiny block of navigation in the corner of a page.

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This links a visitor to an information page on Wikipedia (albeit not quite as neatly as it once did), or their press ads on Flickr, TV on YouTube, and so on. If anyone was searching for a definition of what ‘web 2.0 thinking’ looked like, surely this was it. (Shame these thoughts are wasted on clients like Hummer and Cadillac, really).

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Modernista’s joke was a good one, but one ultimately undone by the achilles heel of ‘web 2.0’: these ‘public’ sites often look awful. It’s patently obvious that the next step in decent web design is to make simple ‘content management systems’ (CMS) or blog based systems vaguely attractive.

Currently, it’s tough to break the mould; designing purely for HTML forces art directors back into gridded boxes and limited typeface choices. Include too many pictures and the usability police will lock you up. (And don’t even think about angled type). Because so many sites like Amazon’s have had ever-present, top-down and side ‘navigation’ for so long it’s hard to persuade clients otherwise. The ‘rules’ are starting to stick.

As ex-D&AD President Simon Waterfall admitted, ‘People don’t want to be entertained as much as serviced. Online art direction is now subservient to purpose and in an economic crunch clients want returns, not rewards from D&AD’. You can see this shift in how Poke’s work has changed - once its Alexander McQueen site was a slow loading but beautiful experience. Now? It’s still elegant, but it’s job is to sell.

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Their TopShop site doesn’t look like much but takes huge amounts of cash, because it works, and offers fast, rotating views of keenly priced clothes. It’s unsurprising that many established interactive agencies like All of Us and Digit are just as keen on installation design, a chance to avoid the pitfalls of online and flex their muscles.

In the short term, at least, things will keep simplifying. If web design has become semi-skimmed, it becomes skinnier still when you consider designing for mobile devices. A recent ad-hoc survey showed that just 6 out 50 US retailers had sites optimised for iPhone screens, surely a stat destined to change. Many of us will admire the elegant layout of a site like Monocle magazine’s...

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...but in the time it takes to load you could scan most of the intentionally un-designed, not-changed-for-years Drudge report, or the front page of the New York Times online.

But there are still high-fat, high broadband delights on offer. The US 3G network Sprint recently unveiled a fabulous stat-based ‘widget’ site that offers a panoply of statistical delights ticking over in real time in front of your eyes, taking live research and feeds from around the world whilst showing you the ‘top words being used online’ or documenting the number of ‘transplants today’.

Marvellous. If we’re trying to adjust to a low-fat world, we’re going to need the occasional indulgence like this, every now and again.

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