no matter which way you tilt it, ugly is ugly
Okay. Jason Santa Maria commented on it here, Jeffrey Zeldman commented on it here, and probably a lot of other people commented on it as well. It’s the now age-old assertion that “ugly is good” when it comes to internet design. The other two guys — leaders in the field — have offered measured, balanced, and compelling reasons why ugly design on the web is not a good aesthetic consideration (duh), but I thought I’d step in using a slightly different tone:
What kind of fucking moron swaggers around like a complete fool making sweeping proclamations about an approach as fallacious as “ugly design” is “good design”? That has got to be the most absurd oxymoron I’ve ever heard.
Let me be just a bit more measured: presenting information on the web has the exact same needs as presenting information via any other media. Designing the framework in which that information is presented, and through which it’s navigated, communicates that information more effectively.
The argument for Ugly is that the web is more effective when aesthetics, careful color palettes, and the other tools of traditional design, are chucked out the window in favor of extremely plain, even unattractive presentations of information.
Mega-success Craigslist is often cited as an example of why Ugly works. The claim is that because Craigslist looks like a link aggregator from 1996 (when, likely, there really weren’t aggregators as such), it’s successful. Jason Santa Maria says it best when he replies:
Craigslist is often cited as a prime example for the ugly/undesigned site success story. Guess what, that’s because you can’t see past the visuals. Does that mean it fails or is poorly designed? Well, no, just one piece of the puzzle is missing. Fortunately for Craiglist, the other pieces are so strong that they are able to overcome it. Craigslist succeeds despite its graphic design.
(my emphasis)
Jason is quite right — just because Craigslist is ugly as sin and a success doesn’t mean that it’s a success because it’s ugly. As Jason goes on to say, there are gallons of ugly/non-design sites cluttering up the interwebs, which are anything but successful. Craigslist succeeds despite its graphic design, not because of it.
Any effective design is one which delivers its contents to the reader most effectively. At its very heart, this is what any design should do. These guys on the Ugly bandwagon understand this just as well as the opposition — they just argue that the path to effectiveness lies in reducing the web to generic, stock HTML. I’m not going to claim that there isn’t a site in the world which isn’t most effectively designed by going Ugly, but I am going to claim that blindly making every site conform to this standard is to completely miss the point of what design should be. A design should use layout, color, and graphics to deliver its contents most effectively, on a site to site basis. Those who claim that all sites would benefit from one approach are the same types of people who think that you can set your Unsharp Mask filter to one group of settings and then apply it to every photo you correct. The world is simply not that narrow.
And calling this Ugly thing “nondesign” is absurd. Everything is design. Designing a site to be “nondesigned” is still a design choice. Choosing, for example, to let the browser present all the H2s and ps using the generic font and size is still a design choice: the designer has designed the site in this manner (duh). Everything is design. If you truly took design away from a site, it would disappear. The appearance of content necessitates design.
This does not necessarily mean that whipping up some kind of goopy, over-saturated site is going to make the content better. Poor design is poor design, whether it’s got two megabytes worth of background images or whether it has zero. Design is a set of aesthetic decisions intended to deliver content better — it should not be a platform for a designer to drown the content beneath his or her palette of egotistical meanderings.
Take a look at A List Apart. Redesigned some months ago, the designers chose a very subtle, very clear, very “print” style design approach. While beauty is in the eye of the beholder, I would contend that most visitors think it’s a “good design” for its subject matter. I certainly think it is. The choice of typography, white space, and layout with its magazine-style approach, enhances the content, rather than distracting from it.
Would A List Apart be a more effective website if all this print-inspired layout were stripped away, and it was made Ugly? Emphatically, no. Because the design was very carefully chosen to present the content in an environment which emphasizes its tone, removing this design would require the visitor to work harder to draw the meaning and context out of the content. The design here — as it should everywhere — focuses the reader’s attention and creates an atmosphere in which the content can convey the strongest meaning in relation to its subject matter.
That’s what I mean when I say that good design is design which enhances and delivers its content most strongly. If, by some chance, using an unformatted, Ugly approach is the best environment for a site’s content to be delivered most powerfully, great. Go for it. Fabulous. To claim that all web sites should go that way because a variety of designs somehow cloud the internet? Give me a fucking break.
I find this whole sabre-rattling thing enormously distasteful. Time to move on. I think, for my next post, I’ll do something enormously innocuous, like talking about some 1980s TV show.
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