Excerpts from Pixellated Pragmatism
Excerpts from Pixellated Pragmatism by Michael Johnson
(click for more example sites on his blog, including modernista.com’s navigation only “website”)
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.
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.
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.
