Did Keats say it best?
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” – that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
Then yesterday my boss, who’s enthusiastically embracing wikis, blogs and anything else we can throw at her asked “Do they have to look so ugly?”
I know what she means – it’s related to my earlier musings about They’re Beautiful and the focus on utility of Web 2.0. The fact is, a wiki’s never going to win a beauty contest, except possibly in the Bauhaus section. RSS feeds are never going to stop your heart the way the first frames of Link’s home forest in Zelda: The Ocarina of Time did. Facebook is essentially a neat tower block (though another blogger describes it as a Swiss army knife, which is a neat summary in a lot of ways). Digg is very…what it is. Del.icio.us has a certain typographic pop-art appeal (like the words that crawled out of the Hobgoblin’s magic hat in Finn Family Moomintroll).
The flipside to the problem, though (as she went on to comment) , is that people who won’t touch a shiny, complex content management system will happily weigh into a wiki with gay abandon simply because it isn’t “pretty” or even “finished” – that’s the very fact that makes it okay to doodle or experiment or make mistakes on, like scrap paper. And as a post on 9rules comments, Magnolia’s understatedly cute aesthetic may well be prettier than del.icio.us but they’re yet to achieve the kind of escape velocity of their competitors.
So perhaps in an area where function is everything, an overly polished form is actually seen as a barrier?
Still, a bit of colour here and there would be nice. Even the average Zen rock garden has a bit more than nicely raked gravel going on.
Filed under: Web 2.0, aesthetics, design
