clue free

The 80s marketing term “user friendly” begat one of the classic Unix quips: “Unix is user-hostile” (or: “Unix is user-friendly. It’s just very selective about who its friends are.”) Web portals, everyone’s favorite 90s busybox, very quickly became user hostile as distractions were, well, kind of their whole purpose.

Readability is a useful/controversial bookmarklet that strips away all the crap you find in typical web portals these days:

Even though AdBlock Plus has nigh-magical abilities to make certain websites bearable, the problem has gone beyond paid-placement ads as the site itself is screaming almost as loudly to draw you into another of its corners, like Wikipedia with colors. As the ALA article mentions, what should be an act of “reading” withers to “browsing”, a descriptor that was okay-I-guess in the era of black & white internet (which, ironically, grew out of a no-design, content-heavy, academics-only web.)

I don’t agree that publishers “just need to find something users are willing to pay for” (they won’t, and neither will they.) But I do think that a page could be taken from the attitude some forward-thinking internet music/game vendors have taken, which is to trust your users. While everyone else was DRMing everything up, these guys took a step back and said, “hey, if they’re already trying to pay us, why don’t we not assume they’re trying to steal?” The nuance in publishing is different, but the attitude is the same: goad the user into pursuing topics/authors further, and if you’ve done your job right, they probably will. “People get disinterested halfway through! We need to keep pulling them through to other pages!” Oh, boo hoo. They’ll probably be back tomorrow, and maybe next week. Until they figure out your content sucks and they move on to your competitors. You got the short-term ad bucks, but lost the war.

The fantasy:

The reality:

MySpace always looked like an abomination, but… what the hell? This looks bad even for an in-development site. There are at least three design motifs at war here.

Dark blue and black text on a dark grey background. Very good, Timmy! Next week we will learn our times tables!

What’s the deal with all the energy domes lately? Are we looking at the new swoosh?  Was DEVO 30 years ahead of their time (again)?  We did have a primate running the country for eight years–not four–after all.

This from the Brandthropology manifesto:

We believe that to be globally successful, it is as important to know how to devolve a brand’s equities as it is to know how to evolve them.

Those responsible have kind of a cute flash-based site.

Post-election links having (almost) nothing to do with politics:

• This Fucking Election captures all the catchphrases of these last two brutal years.
• Tim Schafer’s bizarro life presents him with a semi piled high with cement caskets, and he has the good sense to blog it.
• We Bleed Design: Very clever interplay between foreground and background imagery; scroll down for the win.
• Writer’s strike? No problem; Annie Hall with all dialogue stripped out is still a super-hilarious picture.  And while the study of any one Woody Allen credit roll would suffice, The Art of the Title Sequence appreciates a broader style.  Several are better than their films deserve.
• There’s an ultra delicious burger waiting for me at Hodad’s in Ocean Beach, CA. I must possess it…
• Chilling on-the-ground images of the town near Chernobyl, which still has a couple hundred residents. Slogging through page after page of empty-shell communist apartment buildings makes the last page of the gallery all the more poignant, as you see snapshots of the town before the disaster–full of happy children.  It’s like a Jerry Bruckheimer opening sequence in reverse!
• Japan continues to amaze as they deliver Kewpie Mayonnaise, which comes in a plastic bottle (okay) in a plastic bag (WTF?!?)  Frivolous packaging FTL.  And it has MSG.  BTW.  Also, please enjoy hilarious and inventive bento at Wackyfun Food Art Time.

Recently appreciated in webbyland:

• volll is an incredible Hungarian design firm with an incredible web site that asks you to not only scroll down, but scroll up. Hat tip to them for bringing all this stuff in at just over 500k.
• Really love the NYC Subway aesthetic Filipe Fortes is using. Regarding his featured article of the moment: there is a half-assed attempt at maintaining a vertical rhythm in CF’s design, strictly via CSS, but yeah, those darn images keep throwing everything off.
• Creepy ads of the 1950s include the self-slicing pig. (An incredibly badly-drawn self-slicing pig.)
• Video of an amazing ninja dog escaping from a cage (and probably then dashing off to rescue Predator-era Schwarzenegger.)  cf.: ninja cat.

By the way, kudos to the WordPress team for including “Schwarzenegger” in their auto-spellchecker.