Edward Tufte calls all that crap that surrounds information graphics but does nothing to add to the reader’s understanding “chartjunk.” As websites have become more sophisticated there is a tendency to add gizmos—call it infotrash—as if yours is the only site on the web. You know it when you see it: cluttered design, flash animations for the sake of, well, flash animations, links to everything imaginable, multiple text boxes, and all the rest.
Brent Simmons has written Don’t make me touch that thing, a wonderful assessment of the problem and a potential solution: minimalist design. “You don’t need a kitchen-sink approach, since your Web site is part of a huge family, it’s part of the entire Web. Allow the rest of the Web to do the things that you don’t do,” Simmons advises.
Think about watching television. We think we’re zoning out in front of the tube, but that’s not what’s happening. Our brains are working overtime to make sense of the images and messages that constantly bombard our visual sensibility. It’s getting the same with websites and we’re starting to assess even great sites by asking whether we “have the energy to do all the filtering [we] need to do in order to read it,” according to Simmons.
I’ve used RSS syndication to read many sites for the past few years because it routes around all that flash and animated gifs that make it almost impossible to read some pages. It’s very distracting to try to read text when something’s blinking at you off to one side. I’ve never written anything about it, though, because I’m afraid that a lot of the advertising-supported sites will turn their RSS feeds off. Simmons comes right out and suggests what a lot of us suspect: “RSS is popular in part because it routes around the kitchen-sink designs of many news sites.”
0 responses. Comments closed for this article.