31 May 06
Visual Fluff
Steve left a comment to my last article saying
[...] do we really need CSS then? At the end of the day it is only visual fluff!
Which got me thinking about the relationship between CSS and visual fluff. The reason I kept my site relatively simple and clean is because I don’t like clutter, I don’t think I need to have a gimmicky design. My work is all about visuals, being in a creative design agency, so I do a lot of work involving visual fluff, mainly related to branding, etc. I personally don’t think we need a lot of branding on sites, especially when it comes to things like personal sites, and technical sites, which is why I moaned about the Code Igniter site.
Fair enough, catalogue sites need branding as they have television commericals, printed adverts, various online presences, etc, but if we look at the successes of the internet, we see an underlying theme. Simplicity.
Google has it’s almost bare front page, with only it’s almost-underdesigned results pages. Slashdot looks like it’s from the mid-90’s. del.icio.us is as – if not even more – underdesigned than Google. 37signals never stop talking about simplicity. They’re all insanely popular, because they rely on their content and products being really useful, not the design looking nice.
Now, this fact is not startlingly new. In fact, there have probably been 12,397 similar articles since I started writing this, all saying “that Google is soooo much betta than MSN. MSN sux. 4eva!” or something like that. I dunno. I’m not down wid da kids.
Obviously, the only way to solve this is using the international language of Venn diagrams.
First Venn diagram shows a theoretical ideology of how web design should be:
Mmmm… yes. The next diagram shows how current web design is at the moment:
Which is rubbish really. Now, this is how the web should be:
That’s much better.
So Steve – CSS is not visual fluff, and visual fluff is not CSS. But they cross over. But lessons of the interweb say that we don’t need visual fluff to have a happy site. Let’s have less fluff in general, people!
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CSS “Cascading Style Sheets” LessoNs – WeB DesigN LessoN – - Web site : http://WWW.css-lessons.ucoz.com/index.html
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Comment by Steve Tucker on 31 May 2006, 20:28
I see where you are coming from Rik but I must respectfully disagree. As web developers we only have a small amount of visual space to utilise on the screen. Whether our goal is to make a make an impact, promote a product or display a large amount of information in an easy to read format I believe we must make use of any techniques we have available to make that goal more achievable and the experience better for the consumer, providing that we do not sacrifice on quality (such as accessibility, etc). My site for example utilises a large drop down navigation at its head. I chose to do this because I wanted an ultra clean design where all the focus would lie on the content. Tartin it up was just the bonus :). I reckon visual fluff has received a bad rap because it has rarely been executed correctly and for the right reasons in the past. So I say up with the visual fluff – providing it is done right.