/Culture/ Attack of the clones
04/07/2006 | Filed under Design > Culture
Internet design has become repetitive. Is the web eating itself or are we simply seeing the beginning of usability convergence? Richard Wentk investigates…
Imagine trying to read a book that has no contents page, no cover to let you know what it was called or who wrote it, fonts that changed with every page and a random sequence of page numbers. You’d give up, of course.
Common standards emerged in print because uniformity was the only way to ensure that content can be read and understood by many people. The web, for all its millions of sites, has also evolved its own set of conventions, from the official standards set out by the W3C, to a more casually agreed set of rules. Navigation tends to sit on the left or top, fonts are generally sans serif and text is broken down into legible chunks. Professional web designers take great care these days to build sites that not only work across different platforms and browsers, but are visually accessible, too. Yes, standards are good. However, is design itself becoming too standardised as a result? Have you noticed sites that share more than just a conventional approach to navigation? Colour palettes, font sets, layouts, logos, and so on. Then there are the blog publishing tools and CMS solutions that create masses upon masses of ‘me-too’ sites. Has the web got stuck in a design rut, or does it matter that sites are looking more like one another?
This generic look is boxy – information lives in clearly defined and separated areas with right-angled edges – with a tendency for menu bars to congregate at the top or the left, subsidiary links and information to appear at the right, and main copy in the middle. Graphically there’s usually a single logo, sometimes combined with a stock photo. It’s as interesting to make a list of what’s not happening (such as riots of colour, all-in-one designs that use a visual metaphor that isn’t DTP based, designs that don’t rely on conscious minimalism) as it is to summarise the existing trends.
A generous interpretation would see this as an evolution towards an efficient web language. A less positive view might see it as a lack of imagination and a tendency towards conformity. Tom Beasley of Wired Media, a Bristol design house, sees both sides: “There’s a much better understanding of best practices now than there was a few years ago, and it’s taken a while to understand what they are. The web is all about putting information across, and having recognisable site models with good usability to help with that. As for the graphic design trends, those are due to the design community. For a long time that was influenced by what was new and trendy. So, for example, when 2Advanced appeared, all of a sudden almost every site that came out looked very similar. I don’t think that helped users at all, because quite a few designs were there to impress other designers, not to help users. Now I think that’s changing because web design is getting an influx of newcomers from other disciplines; there are people with a pure graphic design background who aren’t influenced by the current trends.”
Chris Berridge of Omni Productions offers a slightly different perspective: “We’re deliberately introducing some click-and-build generic ecommerce template designs because we think there’s a big market for smaller clients who are less interested in look, and more in behaviour. So where a large customised site could cost £3,000, we’re aiming to offer our service for £50 per month with no consultancy, but with some customisability at the client’s end. The sites will look quite generic, but our goal isn’t to make a design statement.
“That aside, generally yes, there does seem to be some convergence. We find some of that is client-driven. There aren’t that many cuttingedge businesses out there prepared to put their brand on the line. We get a fair few ‘Can we have one of those please?’ client requests. Some of this is driven by accessibility, and that’s a good thing, because the more wellstructured and well thought-out web sites there are, the more people use them, and the more we get to design them. There are sites such as Style Gala (www.stylegala.com) that showcase new designs and allow other designers to vote for them. So there’s always a certain amount of innovation happening – even if other people then borrow ideas from it.”
Tom Beasley agrees: “I think broadband has really opened up the options. For example, there’s RoadRunner.com, which offers a local content aggregation service. And I thought Saab’s recent AnimalVision promotion (www.lowetesch.com) was outstanding. So the potential is definitely there to do something different and original.”
However, it’s possible to take the flattery of imitation too far. Address hijacking – where a misspelled name leads to a similar but subtly different site – is well known. Unfortunately, more extreme examples of web cloning happen, too. Kieron Donoghue runs UK Offer (www.ukoffer.com) and is one of the pioneers of affiliate portals that aggregate shopping links to create a unified shopping site. His experience of imitation has been more literal than most. “Four or five times now I’ve had the layout, structure, sales text and other details copied word for word with cut and paste,” he says. “This kind of literal site copying seems to be more and more widespread in some areas. When I was designing my site I went for familiarity, because that’s what users are used to. Look at Amazon, for example, the design hasn’t changed in years. And I’d rather go for usability than be clever. So I kept the design as simple as possible. But that means anyone can take an idea. You can’t patent a design unless it uses some new technology. So ideas spread fast. I was one of the first to start promoting broadband resales, and now you see that everywhere. But it’s easier still just to copy and paste.”
Perhaps the strangest example of web cloning is when someone takes the information on your site and reworks it for their own reasons. Matthew Somerville has gained a certain notoriety for creating copies of sites that improve on the originals. He explains why he does it: “I used to have an Acorn, with a very basic web browser and no support for stylesheets, and it was annoying when sites didn’t work and you couldn’t do basic things such as submit a form because you were expected to have JavaScript. My motivation was to make sites more accessible in every way, both technically and for the visually impaired, who use screen readers that lack the features of the main browsers. I unofficially reworked sites for National Rail and the Odeon to improve their accessibility, which is generally something that isn’t made enough of. National Rail has been supportive, and said that as long as the site didn’t look like theirs they were happy to have something online that worked better. Odeon threatened legal action after a year so I had to take the site down.” It should give pause for thought to corporations everywhere that a student in the middle of a demanding course with a busy exam timetable can produce designs in his spare time that have much better accessibility than those produced by professional design companies.
From one point of view, web metaphors and customer models are converging, and that’s not a bad thing. If commercial web sites have a standard layout, everyone wins. Design becomes easier, and customers and visitors will be able to find their way to what they want quickly and efficiently, which is what the web is all about. From the other angle, commercial graphic design is also converging on a selection of preset looks, and this may not be such a healthy sign. Accessibility plays a part in this, but can’t explain all of it, because questions of accessibility aren’t dealt with consistently, such as when designers refuse to use serifed or cursive fonts because supposedly they are hard to read on the screen, and then use tiny six point or even four point lettering instead.
If the current trend towards homogeneity seems bleak, it should be viewed as an opportunity as opposed to a problem, because there’s now a gap in the market for bold designers who want to break away from the pack. Ironically, it’s the blogging world that’s ahead of the game, with a creative ferment that has leap-frogged corporate culture. For every hundred kitschy blogs there are one or two that hit the spot, with elegance, accessibility, and compelling content. And in the business world there are other new models and designs that are waiting for creatives to popularise them. Could one of those creatives be you? Time will tell…
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Comments
31337 / 10/10/2006 / 00:11
I often find it interesting and worth wild to build off other ideas. Not to copy work or code, but look at what works and improve with my own ideas. The Internet sites could use some redundancy, and standards. In fact that is how the internet works redundancy.
I hate having to go through and find every bug for, IE7, IE6, IE5..., Fire Fox, Mac Browsers, Netscape, etc... Non of them like each other.
I feel that the look of sites should be different and there should be improvements. But, I am really getting sick of the clone argument. Most of the time a site should look like every other site. There is good reason behind having a "clone site" It works! There is no need to improve something if it works, You would not put square wheels on a car would you? All cars are clones they all have this round wheels, no triangles, squares, hexagons, they are all round. But, not every round wheel is the same, they make improvements but the idea is the same, round works more then every thing else.
It is like Google, they really did not do very much more then every other search company out there, they just improved the simplicity of the site and worked on improving the way it searches. Then guess what every other company looked at there site and thought, maybe having less adverts, and not giving fake results will improve our profits, maybe having a simple home page would improve access to more users and load speed. They all started to change, just look at ASK, MSN, YAHOO, etc... They all just improve from then next guy that has the next best thing.
It is nice to be creative but, unless there is some new idea that is better then the old one, let there be clones. Users want something that works, but they also want the best thing that works. I think that clones are great, what I would like to see are improved clones. How great would that be, all the ideas that work + ideas that improve them. A never ending cycle, of improvement and standards.
Is a creative designer not a clone of every other designer. Soon his design becomes the clone, then it is no longer creative. Right now it is creative to be a clone, I don't think that will ever change.
Mathew Browne / 15/06/2007 / 10:49 / http://www.mbwebdesign.co.uk
I don't have a problem with clones. At least we aren't seeing the proliferation of Geocities circa 1999 sites because people think spinny gifs are cool.
Anthony Bradley / 08/07/2007 / 14:27 / http://www.saveyourmarriage.co.uk
Why do people visit a website? Information.
The information they want has to be laid out logically and fairly consistently as people are very impatient and itching to click on something, especially the back button if they can't see what they want quickly enough.
Do they really care if it looks like a Ferrari or a Trabant? Generally no, unless they are into design.
As long as it is not like a dog's dinner they couldn't care less.
Richard Terris / 01/02/2010 / 18:12
In repsonse to 31337
"All cars are clones" - All cars do have round wheels yes, well observed, but if you look above the wheels you will notice that the body of the car is far different.
No-one is suggesting with the "clone argument" that we change what is under the hood - The web works the same way for each site, in that the browser resnders the HTML into what the user sees, which using your car example would be the engine or wheels. What is being suggested is that sites are starting to look the same....
Also, to suggest that google did nothing different than any other "search company out there" is ridiculous!!!! Google's search algorithm completely revolutionised the way that web sites are indexed and searched. I believe you'll find that since Google came along, a great many other search engines have moved to the way that the google search algorithm works.
Your general argument seems to be that copy-catting is ok, which seems to be the opinion of a very lazy web designer.
