Samification of the current Web
Hello I hope you all have a good [insert time of Day] !!!
Maybe a bit of background about me:
(25 Age idk if that is relevant, but it could be interesting how other age groups see that)
I really like unique stuff. If it's design or clothes or web design or whatever you might think of. I have been working privately on my own website, and I built it almost from scratch. I really like unique-looking websites, and I also like the 2000s era style of design (not only limited to web-design).
I have been noticing a lot of websites that they look more and more the same. The same structure, design, similar colors, similar pictures etc, etc...
And I think this is just very boring and it just feels like more and more the web isn't made for us humans. It feels everything is being more and more optimized either for SEO (Search Engine Optimization) or for AI scrapping. And I feel like being alienated from using the internet (Yes, also sadly that's the case in many other areas).
And I asked some people and what they basically told me is that they like that everything looks the same and everything feels the same. Since they can go on every website and understand the layout and know how to navigate every website.
So I wanted to ask what is your opinion about this topic?
Do you care what the Internet looks like? Do you mind that everything looks same~ier?
Ideally websites are unique with their own styling, identity and quirks.
Having done a lot of webdesign in the early 2000s I also do miss the real identity even corporate websites had back then compared to now.
Having said that, for some contexts there is a real benefit to websites being very similar. Specifically for navigating corporate websites it is nice to not have to entirely guess where to find something or to figure out how to navigate that particular website.
For personal websites that doesn't matter as much and I love coming across websites crafted by hand and love. Though, the only thing I wish people would remember is that for long form context there are some good practices for line width, font types and readability in general. It's a shame to come across a well written blog and struggle to read it comfortably.
Edit: I might go in a bit more detail later. Wrote this on my phone while on a train.
Edit2: Had an excellent day btw, thanks! Hope your part of day is also going well!
Do you have any links or other resources, or even just an example for this? It's always good to get more insight into readability, especially because I know it goes beyond accessibility.
I'd argue that it is closely related to accessibility as well. Anyway, as far as your request for resources go, I had a crack at finding good neutral resources about it. The problem is that a lot of the advice has been studied a bunch and has been around for a while. Since then been co-opted by seo driven websites, UX bureaus, etc who parrot this advice as their own to attract people googling on it it. Which made finding resources that do not look sus harder than I thought.
Having said that, I did manage to track down higher quality resources. There are two main principles I often encounter I'll mention specifically which are line length and font choice. But, there is a lot more to readability on websites like font size, line height, contract and much, much more. So I'll also link to a variety of other resources as well.
Line length (or width if you will)
Line length has a minimum and maximum size that allows most people to comfortably read text. This range is roughly between 50-70 characters per line. For resources:
Font choice
Sans-serif fonts generally speaking are easier to read on the widest range of screens. Having said that, on modern higher dpi screens Serif fonts generally are considered to be equal. Monospaced fonts are rarely a good choice as they reduce legibility for most people. The exception here might be people who work a lot in terminals and code editors who are used to monospaced fonts and people with dyslexia who sometimes have an easier time reading text in monospaced fonts. While not exciting, when in doubt Arial is the safest choice ;) Resources:
- Stack exchange thread on monospaced fonts
Other resources.
TL;DR?
40emas the max width will get you close,70chwill also work and is newer.Edit:
@TaylorSwiftsPickles is this what you meant by me being able to talk about this stuff at length? :P
More or less. We've had our fair share of discussions regarding web development on our ✨very inefficient IRC channel✨ so you did seem like the right person to ping on this thread, and I trust your judgement :P
Talk about irc, I recently got a client running again to join some old channels and still have it. I found out that
libera.chathas an unofficial#tildeschannel. No clue who registered it, since it is now empty but I am hanging around there now for anyone who feels nostalgic about irc :PI mean, for personal writing that is absolutely fine. If you are a programmer you have been trained to read monospaced to some degree so probably don't mind and if you are that overlap in the ven diagram it will only strengthen your preferences towards monospaced fonts.
But the majority of people are neither trained in reading monospaced text nor dyslexic. So if your demographic target is more than those two groups, you probably want to give Sans-serif or serif fonts some considerations ;).
my day was a day.
Thanks so much for ur in-depth post about line width and general practices. I'll definitly use this !!!
I think a big reason why so many websites look the same is what web development has became. Everyone uses the same frameworks, design systems, libraries or pre-made UI components, which makes things faster to build (and cheaper) but also very standardized. Personally, that’s what made me lose interest in getting into web development commercially as it didn’t feel as creative as I imagined it would be. I felt more like using specific patterns rather than actually making something unique.
And honestly, that's not exactly connected to your question but I think Android applications are even worse when it comes to that. I realized this during a mobile app development lesson at university, where it found out how strongly Google pushes Material Design. It standardizes almost everything you can think of, which is good for performance but in my opinion it leaves very little room for real creativity.
Yup, this is a trend that started a while ago with frameworks like bootstrap around 2010ish and has continued ever since. It makes it extremely easy to scaffold a basic UI but since you are effectively using pre-fab components the end result is that a lot of these websites look very similar.
These days bootstrap isn't nearly as popular, it has been replaced by things like tailwind where the effect is amplified and possibly made worse in many ways.
The underlying reason is of course fairly simple, cost. It is quicker to make websites like this, you need fewer expensive designers, it is easier to train front-end devs on these tools, etc, etc.
I hate tailwind. I was honestly shocked when I learnt how popular it is, it feels like a creativity killer
It does, it also pollutes the DOM, removes semantic meaning and abstracts things away to the point that it just makes for less competent front-end devs overall.
When I learned how to use Bootstrap over a decade ago, it was such a game changer for me and my organization. Before then, I was custom coding these little websites for our events. Even sometimes having to create my own graphics like buttons and such, or a least having to find some online. I eventually got a coworker who could do art and layouts for me, but it was still a pain in the ass.
But once I caught wind of Bootstrap—as you say, in the early 2010s—it was great. Sped up development and design so much. And the cherry on top was that now our event sites looked "modern." I remember my coworkers and leadership being so impressed. Even using Bootstrap's basic assets with practically no customization, which is exactly what I did the first time I used it, got me lots of plaudits. After that, I started customizing things more and more for each new event.
Yeah our sites looked like all the other sites in existence since these used Bootstrap's framework and design elements, but from a business perspective, there's nothing necessarily wrong with that. If people are adapted to seeing and using a certain UI, and we use it too, that's better for us. That means people know how to use our site from the get-go.
I imagine there's a reason university websites all look and operate the same—even if they're all awful to use: familiarity. I use college websites here since the organization I was making these sites for dealt with colleges. College websites, to me, are some of the most confusing websites to navigate. Most, however, are confusing to navigate in the same or similar ways. Which is, strangely, a good thing.
i have never heard of tailwind... I did an apprentice as System engineer and learned more about coding than the "system engineer" part so I only used bootsstrap in my time (like 6 years ago).
The design stuff comes in waves. Something will take hold and suddenly you see it everywhere. Specifics I can think of are the Fischer Price style icons and the sudden ubiquity of landing page hero shots of people collaborating (never anyone who worked for the company). A lot of icons started looking the same when FontAwesome came out, which I think improved readability overall.
I have to preface this by stating that, as we're on tildes, you're going to get a somewhat biased response simply due to fact that tildes primarily "draws in" specific types of people that in many ways differ significantly from the average internet user. For instance, check out this post: https://tildes.net/~tech/1pkd/one_million_screenshots
That aside - yeah, I very much do empathise a lot. I also really like unique stuff in general, and I am especially pretty annoyed at the fact that the majority of the web (especially corporate web) looks so identical. The latest annoyances for me concerned some sites I'm using in the fashion sector.
There are some very good arguments and technical reasons as to why everything looks the same right now
- which I assume @creesch might get around to as he knows those things a lot better than me¹ - but even so, I'm very strongly opinionated about this topic; I genuinely want every corporate (and also every non-corporate) site to look very different and actually show off its identity, even if they do end up converging on some "conveniences". Then again, my partner would say I'm very strongly opinionated about way too many things. Though, I certainly am not fond of whatever https://pierre.co/ has going on, so maybe let's not go that way. That said, in my experience, the old WWW style more or less died as soon as "being constantly connected to the internet" became obiquitous. Having been around on the interwebz since the early 2000s, the "decline" was really noticeable to me in the early 2010s when android went mainstream in my area but could be traced back to the late 2000s overall.Then again, I'm alienated by almost all technology nowadays. I don't like where almost any consumer (or enterprise) technology has been heading towards since, idk, the mid 2010s, and it's only been getting worse and worse. Which, in turn, means I've only become more and more of a "luddite" as time went/goes on. There are some exceptions I genuinely like a lot - especially self-checkout machines in stores, which I love - but, overall, sometimes I genuinely feel like I'm practically becoming a "hermit" in terms of actually using the internet. For example, let's take a peek at my app history on my phone. My top app, on the regular and with a big difference vs anything else, is Signal. My second and third most used app alternate between Three Cheers For Tildes & Firefox Focus, with the latter mainly just being used almost exclusively for reading things posted on tildes + googling random things. Any other app on my phone is almost never used. And I don't use my laptop much at this point either, unless I'm having a call, I wanna order something, or I'm joining the tildes MC server (rip).
1 (edit): Turns out @PierogInTheButt got into that topic before @creesch did ;)
Oooh that is what you meant, I remember
rantingtalking about it now a while ago. I'll reply to @PierogInTheButt with some additions.Also older tech is so much more innovative so I understand you very well, I've been playing a bit of PSP Vita and honestly it feels cool to use such an innovating device. And what i reallly like is that it just works. so yay old tech.
(Also apple ipods are a thing and they are very cool i still have to mod mine but yay)
Thanks for the link because I like their design a lot! It’s too over the top, but I appreciate they swung for the fences. It’s inspiring :)
Today most mainstream sites look similar, but there are plenty of oddly-formatted niche sites. There's the "indie web" (ex: indieweb.org, neocities.org, melonland.net) which emphasize Web 1.0 style, and old sites that are still updated and haven't been redesigned. There are also new-style sites that still do something to try and "stand out", like hermes4.nousresearch.com, although they get lots of criticism (ex: that site for hogging memory, other sites for scrolljacking or being hard to read, generally along "just show me the content").
I think it's unfortunate that mainstream taste is what I'd call "bland", but if most people prefer that, I think it's not worth caring about. What we should care about is finding our own groups with interesting taste. The nice thing about the web is that random people can publish almost anything they can create, and you can visit almost any site. There's nothing really stopping groups like the indie web from becoming mainstream except that the mainstream audience doesn't notice them, and when it does doesn't find them worthy of attention/contribution.
While not necessarily "new," I would put apple's product pages in this category as well. For the iPhone Air product page, as an example, you'll see many different animations and such as you scroll. Perhaps the most "Apple" one to me is having the phone image rotate as you scroll past it.
apple always had like such an apple way of doing everything from the packaging to the websites to the stores it's very strict. I think this site just fits so well to the brand of them. Thanks for sharing ^^
I've been digging through this space a bit for inspiration on some current projects.
There's a lot of reasons the web has turned into a swamp of best practices and many of them are good ones. People have listed several good points and links, but I'll tack on a few thoughts about how we got here.
To some degree, I think the web and "digital media" have become less prestigious than they were between 2000-2015, but maybe that's just me seeing it from a different angle at this point. The internet has become business as usual and websites are table stakes. Most importantly, for a lot of products, fairly straightforward pages tend to convert better and bring in more sales. People didn't necessarily know that in 2000--and why wouldn't they try to impress customers in any way they could?
The tooling was obviously much worse in many ways. There were a ton of people experimenting with Macromedia/Adobe Flash for building interactive experiences that are now gone. There were also all kinds of crazy browser plugins for one off 3-D experiences and such. Over time online video was added in, but it was limited because performance was a major factor. These things were constraints that forced people to be creative. Now, a small business can use something like Squarespace or Shopify to do what they need, upload a bunch of high resolution images, and cut out engaging with creative/agencies to bring in that expertise. There needs to be somebody in the picture who wants to champion doing cool things, and businesses tend to be more focused on "make it work" than "make it nice."
I think that for creatives in the early 2000s (and the people paying them), there was genuinely a lot of excitement about pushing boundaries and making things that stood out. Marketing people were still trying to figure out what would work and big corporations were spending a lot to take chances on bizarre campaigns like Sublymonal, Subservient Chicken, etc. (I'd love try and list more, but it's crazy how much of this really big stuff has become bit rot or lost media.) T.V. and print were still very much in the mix, cellphones/shortcodes were emerging, and people were looking for ways to tie them together.
The audience, design trends, and the constraints have changed. The browsers people use now are on phones, with less screen real estate for flourish. Alternatively, now companies may just opt to build an app or something inside a walled garden. Do people even bother to look at product descriptions anymore? Can people even still read? It feels like we've moved to putting in a highlight video, or just laying rasterized text over product images. Going digging through some of these old sites and projects I think, "this would just be a video now, that other thing would probably be an animation." I could keep going.
I think there's still a place for personality, and I've always tried to put some in my projects, but it's a harder to fit in these days. There's a tinge of sadness to the fact that now browsers have all these things that were dreamed of in the 90s/2000s (animations, 3d, video, music, etc) and most of us probably spend our time in the same old haunts, occasionally peeking out at a sea of largely identical feeling sites.
With all that laid out, here are some potential paths to go down for anybody interested in tracking down old sites for inspiration (people here probably at least know some of these):
Figured I'd share this one that I came across today: https://posthog.com
I have no clue what the company is about and navigation feels a bit clunky. Which is part of the reason we see a lot of corporate websites not having such unique looks anymore. But I do love the overall design and approach!
https://posthog.com/feet-pics
nice
I stumbled onto the “trash” section first and found this link and a rickroll, then the forums, so I assumed this was a website for fun. I was very confused after clicking the rest of the pages and slowly realizing that this is a legit company with a product to sell. The design is awesome, although I am curious about how this impacts sales.
Thanks for sharing this cool find.
Honestly I think it's awesome
I want to add that in the old days, you didn't have to care about accessibility. But around 2020ish, the DOJ said that ADA does apply to the web, so websites can be sued for being insufficiently accessible — and they do. It generated a whole industry of lawyers looking for websites to sue. This meant more standardization in colors and forms.