QuirkeyBlogEst. 2005

(I mean I have a distaste for buzzwords as much as the next guy – but there’s no reason not to use them if you and the party you are addressing both have a common understanding of what you’re referring to.)

I just read this article on Web 2.0 by Roman Mittermayr and it really got my cogs turning. The article basically outlines some rules to use to make you website look ‘2.0’. He states himself this article has nothing to do with technology – just design. It came off to me a bit sarcastic but maybe Im just projecting. I think 2.0 obviously has a lot more to do with the technology and implementation than the design but still he is right that there is a clear delineation between designs of old and of the new modern-web app. I think for the most part he’s right in picking out some of the main style points of 2.0 but my addition is that there are very good reasons for these new choices/styles.

Oversized Fonts

The use of oversized fonts has a number of reasons/origins. First, I believe the big font trend is a reaction to the tiny font trend of a number of years ago. Just a little while ago, lots of sites used pixel fonts to look cool and fit tons of info on a single page. This was also a trick in Flash based websites to provide for faster loading and readability. As with a lot of the 2.0 trends, the move is toword usability and ‘friendliness’ – tiny fonts don’t fit into that. Second, Its just a fact that monitors are getting bigger. As monitors get bigger the average web viewing are is getting much bigger. Im not looking at any studies – but from personal experience – I used to design for 640×480. Recently the standard has been for 800×600 but many sites, including pitchfork design for 1024×768. On viewing screens of that size a 10px font is TINY. On 1280×1024 even 12px is really small. Web 2.0 is about designing for simplicity and usability. In designing for the masses – big gets your message across.

I was going to split everything else up, but then I realized all the other points fit under one gigantic reason:

CSS!

Since we moved to the standard browser set of Firefox 1.0, IE 6, Safari CSS support is standard and solid. Im not going to bother ranting about IE support for CSS (hold me back, hold me back), but we can basically say that modern browsers support CSS and allow us to do great things like rounded corners and gradients and other great things without tables and other bull. Standards is also a big part of this. Or as Mittermayr calls it “Descriptive HTML (XML style)”. Standards. Zeldman. W3C. You know Web Standards.

At the end of this ramble, Id like to present you with a point: Web 2.0 (design wise) is a reaction to real and concrete factors in the evolving internet. It think Fred Wilson is right, that there 2.0 implies a release some sort of definite point. Obviously, the web is moving quickly but there is most certainly a difference between this and this

Note: The article also lacked a lot of good examples. See the MoMB for that.

Posted February 3rd, 2006 in Design, Development
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