What is Marc Greene teaching ‘em at The New School Department of Media Studies and Film? Whatever it is, we’re happy to have made Nora Beckman’s “bad” list:
And of course the “good” stuff:
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Bad design: Too many Flash or moving elements
Good design: Not too many Flash or moving elements
There’s something Fundamental about the symmetry in all this.
Comment by Emmet Byrne — 2/19/2008 @ 6:43 pm
Funny, I was thinking there was something symmetrical about those Fundamentals.
Comment by Diana — 2/19/2008 @ 7:13 pm
You guys happen to check out this Lindsay Lohan spread on the New York Magazine site?
hmmmm. . . not sure what to think.
Comment by Scott Ponik — 2/19/2008 @ 7:15 pm
My favorite point that they are claiming is that if something is “uninteresting” it is then “confusing” or “frustrating.”
Comment by Matthew Rezac — 2/20/2008 @ 11:08 am
Lindsay as the next Marilyn?
Comment by Emmet Byrne — 2/20/2008 @ 2:50 pm
Stop Staring! Clothing is another of the less-than-stellar sites I have come across in the small business department. While the website was actually recently redesigned from an even worse one, in it's current incarnation, I find it to have enough elements of bad design for me to include it here. First, both it's logo and it's navigation buttons running along the top of the screen require flash, so that when you drag your mouse over them, they appear to sparkle or twinkle. I find this monumentally annoying, as I have to click to allow flash elements to appear on my browser. To be using flash on the core navigational part of your website seems ridiculous for a few reasons: it makes it impossible for certain viewers to get past the home page, because without flash you cannot click on any of the other parts of the site, and I have to re-click those flash elements every time I go to a different part of the site. Not only that, but it takes long enough for the pages to load that I became frustrated and went somewhere else. In addition to these annoyances, I found once I entered the shopping cart area of the site, there was a large message sprawling over the page, over certain elements of the cart, saying they were on vacation, looking sloppy and un-professional. I know this is a clothing line with nation-wide distribution and a good following of customers, but their website certainly discourages me from joining their ranks.
harhar. nora you are a superstar!
Comment by jan — 2/20/2008 @ 3:45 pm
Hey Scott!
Wasn’t a fan of the Lindsey as Marilyn shoot myself. What makes the original Bert Stern shoot interesting or at least effective is the historical nature of the images. That can’t really be reproduced with anyone else. Now redone, it’s just artifice.
I personally prefer the Terry Richardson treatment of Lohan for GQ. He got in there and dug into her persona directly, not vis-à-vis Stern/Monroe. Too obvious.
http://popsugar.com/gallery/9013/?page=0,7,0&show=large
Comment by Cameron Wittig — 2/20/2008 @ 3:48 pm
It seems like Nora’s criteria is based only on how a website compares to whatever she feels has become prototypical in current web design. This means one thing if you’re designing a site for millions of people to navigate every day, like amazon.com, but a different thing entirely if you can expect your audience to be aware of other conventions of web design.
Your site is extremely clear and easy to navigate for anyone remotely aware of contemporary web design conventions, especially for design-literate viewers. Several great designers and firms, like Bibliotheque, have used a really similar system. As with most good design, maybe it’s where the designer and the intended audience intersect that is most effective.
Comment by Matt Kelm — 2/25/2008 @ 9:04 pm
Thanks for the critique! I would be happy to revise my lists if people have a more clear idea of ten broad things that make a website well or poorly designed! That’s why I’m taking this class- to learn about such things. It’s not so much the basic layout of the site that was confusing to me, rather it was the confusion I felt when first looking at it in trying to figure out what the idea behind the site was. I wanted more immediate knowledge of what it was, why they were carrying these brands, where they were located, and more options to look through the products. I have a background in art and currently work with clothing, and so am very interested in the ways that people are exploring and expanding the basic commercial website. I guess I was scrambling a little for sites to include on my ‘bad’ design list, and so included one that I had remembered being confused by.
Thanks again! I guess the first thing I should learn is that anything that is posted online, even just as an assignment, is public to everyone!
Comment by Nora Beckman — 2/28/2008 @ 4:28 pm