camelism

It’s such a thing with taste I know… If we like something is very subjective, and the actual reason behind as discussed by many theorists such as Bourdieu mainly stays unconscious, is maybe class-based and influenced by our level of education and knowlege…

However, there are guidelines, or general notions of what is good and what is bad, just like in Music (could we maybe say that we don’t like Mozart, but actually can’t we easily deny his genius musical talent) or in Art (of course should we express our subjective taste, but we have to acknowledge the revolutionizing effects which particular art-pieces had on society, in technique and style as well as the notion of art in general) Analyzing the websites is not much different in that respect… Obviously most website’s don’t aim to qualify as an art piece, no, rather do we have to examine them on the level of functionality. A particular content needs be delivered to a specific target group. So this is one aspect which, to my opinion is central. Accordingly a website which is dedicated for children would be designed in a much more playful way than a corperate’s profile. The principle however stays the same… To define my personal taste, I would say that mostly simple is good, and I prefer simplicity to overloaded pages with excessive special effects… Anyway, as I already pointed, the layout has to fit…

The starting page on my Power Book is the Apple website.

It is created by and for designers, so obviously the website has to come up to high expectations of aestheticism as well as to deliver relevant Apple-related content. Still one can clearly see that the designer’s of the pages aimed to keep the page as simple as possible, leaving the background colour white and keeping the content as compact as possible. The general colour selction of the Webdesign is a variation of grey-tones, again not to distract the viewer with to many colours.

The FrontPage visibly is divided into different frame sections, and the returning customer clearly knows where to recover particular content.
In the center of the page Apple provides the ‘Top Stories’ section, with all the relevant Apple-related news stories which are constantly updated. There is a clear list of links on the front page leading the customer to wherever he or she intends to go.
This site is purely commercial, however a distinction between product-related adverts and external adverbs is not easy for the visitor, who is simply bombarded with products.
Consequently, my conclusion on this website: it works for its purpose (and it would be quite sad if it didn’t, because I am sure Apple invests heavily in the design)

Our university website
Another example, which I actually quite like, and obviously regularly visit is our University website, www.arts.ac.uk.

I do like the design, because, again it is very simple and generally pretty clear, however do I know that I sometimes struggle in finding the content I am looking for.
The starting page of the site explicitly indicates the different college of the the University, in a table-like design, which by clicking on the them will bring the visitor to the individual colleges... the background colour of the front page is white, the only images provided are to distinguish the different colleges from each other… The page clearly emphasizes on its artistic mission, so… yes, I guess it works…

Another example, which I personally find quite horrible, is the celebrity gossip site people.com.

The page is overloaded with information, the design is not very appealing, but I guess it does work for the target group this way… The excessive advertising is very disturbing. The site seems very aggressive, with its blue background colour and suggests to sell the the hottest stories of the minute to its audience… I am sure they invested heavily in the design of the site, and the structure is quite clear….