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I think that makes the point about why avant-garde style can be difficult to comprehend, no?

(read the columns up-and-down …)

>I think the redesigns in that article demonstrate why most websites look the same.

I actually went to each of them, they may "look cool" but they were utterly unusable. The hacker news one was horrific.

That's exactly what I mean. They're cool but impractical. In the end, most websites have actual content they want you to access, and overly cool innovative design can get in the way.

Imagine you logged into Hacker news tomorrow and they switched over to that design. I would assume they were being held hostage by hackers.

Like Hacker News. Most of us are on this website right now via the browser. It's the same interface it's been for years, and that familiarity increases the efficiency of understanding. Re-imaginging everything is a great opportunity for designers to showcase their skills, but wouldn't really improve users' efficiency.

Geocities and MySpace comes to mind when seeing the redesigns. Websites needed some type of convention for the average user to feel comfortable using.

The designs offered really remind me more of graphic designers' websites from the 1990s—confusing, impenetrable, but vaguely artsy.

Some people need to be reminded that design is not just being artsy. Design is for accomplishing purpose beyond screenshots to put on one's portfolio.

A website shouldn't be a book.

It also shouldn't be seizure inducing, retina burning vomit of random colors over a page. A website should be readable with the least amount of mind power given to stuff other than the main content.

Look at the gmail redesign. The modernized it. Used cool new material design and other modern goodies. And yet there is a gmail redesign hate thread on HN every other day.

When I am reading or doing anything, I want to spend my focus and time on the content. Not on the side distractions that serve no purpose.

A website whose purpose is to convey textual information and to be readable should resemble a book, or more likely, a magazine, because it has a similar function to the printed page.

"Convey textual information" is not the sole purpose of any website.

Websites have many purposes and functions, including of course interactive functions and connections with other elements both within the site and from other places.

Completely different to any book.

> "Convey textual information" is not the sole purpose of any website.

It doesn't have to be the sole purpose of any website for it to be the primary purpose of many.

For instance the purpose of this forum, along with many forums, is to convey primarily textual information in the form of comments arranged in a hierarchy.

The purpose of medium.com is to convey textual information in the form of blog posts.

The purpose of a site like Wired, newspaper sites and magazine sites, like their analog counterparts, is to convey textual information (albeit with a heavy graphical element) in the form of articles.

Websites expand upon the possibilities inherent to the medium of the printed page but HTML is a hypertext format, and its purpose (and therefore the purpose of most webpages) is to convey information in the form of hypertext. Interactivity and embedded elements don't detract from the textual nature of the web or its origin in concept or the relationship in the styles evolved with the printed page.

>Completely different to any book.

Different in structure, but not different in purpose, and therefore not completely divorced from the same design considerations.

Yes, we could design every website to look the way the redesigns in the article do, but would you really rather use the hacker news redesign presented in the article than this one? Would you rather use any of those redesigns?

Yup. It should use the power of the medium (the "magic ink") to become even more efficient at its function.

Which is the exact opposite of what this article tries to recommend.

A webside definitely shouldn't be a poster. The "nice" redesigns offered in the article "work" as visually interesting posters, but utterly fail as websites - they become unusable, they sacrifice function to improve the visuals. A book-like website may be suboptimal but is usable, but a fancy poster-like website is much worse than that.

A website is not a book, but just like novels have found an effective form, so websites have also found an effective form.

I'm sure there will be improvements on that form in the future, but when that happens, most websites will adopt it, and most websites will still look very similar.

The book analogy doesn't work. There is no point mentioning books.

A website is nothing like a book in form, function, purpose, appearance, use, lifespan, the list goes on.

You're confusing the equivalence. A "novel" is a type of book. A "website" is not a type of "something".

A website can be anything the owner wants it to be, with different functions and purpose. It doesn't need to conform to the other "novels" because of some perceived "effective form". That's the point I take from the OP's article.

Websites have not "found their form", that's just the reason you've chosen to believe based on so many websites using the same template.

It was never an analogy. I'm saying that a website should be like a website. Just like a book is like a book. And like books, websites have a purpose that determines their design.

A website can indeed be many different things, but a lot of websites have very similar purposes, so it makes every kind of sense that websites with the same purposes end up looking similar. Just like cars look alike. Or houses.

Of course websites with a different purpose are going to look very different.

I wonder if this is in a way tangentially connected to McLuhan's notion of 'the media is the message'. That is, what we really, often, seem to be trying to communicate is the form. The form is the primary. Notice how even the most blase and normative and familiar story is rendered anxiety generative when paired with a non-normative form (most David Lynch movies, for example). Whereas, even the most seemingly brutally intrusive content, is eventually normalized by what we might call normative story-telling structures (most so-called transgressive horror films, for example). This, perhaps, is why we react so negatively to form, rather than content, as we instinctively know that form will neutralize any potentially-revolutionary content. And, of course, this spills over into every other area. After all, the major reason sited by those on the analytic side of the philosophy divide most often cite the seemingly apparent obscurantism (form and the obsession with form among the likes of Heidegger and Adorno and Hegel and Kant) of the construction of continental philosophy as its major detractant.

So it's not what you say, it's how it's said. Which would go far in explaining why traditional liberal democratic practitioners always seems ultimately to fail in arguing against nazism, facism, etc. (That is, not only are they fighting with different weapons, but are on different fields on different days.)

So it might be possible to say that it is not design that distracts from the content. It is the design which is the content. The practicality is the reinforcement of an already-established form of cognitive mapping. In this way, it can be viewed as having parity with religion in society (though in some sense subordinate, as it is form, again, that underlies the function of the religious experience), in the sense that perhaps a given society is propagative-force for those forms on a kind of meta level, so, then, to change the forms is to change the society, the potential injection of a type of medical retro-virus (if attempted consciously), if you will, which, of course, as in the case of any external invasion, would likely trigger a sort of immune response.

True, there may be some absorption and incorporation of a rival form, but only rarely, and possibly, in parallel with biology, the more complex the organism, the less likely such would be possible. And, in any regard, absorption and incorporation would either have to be done is such a fashion as that only those aspects that do not create fundamental change are incorporated, which, in effect, means the intrusion is still neutralized, in the way a dominant culture an import cultural artifacts / aspects from another subordinate culture, a biological organism can, etc, or such absorption would give rise to a new form, meaning the effective annihilation of prior contestant forms.

(incorporation of pagan myth could be an interesting example of this phenomenon. Notice how the content can remain the same when encoded into the new Christianized form, and the same content ceases to be of the pagan culture, ceases to propagate the pagan culture.)

It would be interesting to see if form could be separated from content that it wouldn't then be possible to reconstruct, recognize, and/or recreate any given culture.