Does “ugly” mean no design?
The question of ugly design has been haunting me for a few weeks now. Well, the blank space in my blog is what has really been haunting me all this time, and this topic was approached to me at the beginning of my blog blackout and it hasn’t left me.
Recently I have been asked to think about why My Space is a success. To be honest, I really don’t know that much about My Space. I’m not a user of it. I’m not a user of a lot of standard successful Internet sites. For example, I have never successfully bought anything on eBay. On the flip side I blog, I read blogs, I have used every major north American travel site, I buy things from Amazon, buy.com, barnesandnoble.com and many other stores … and Oh! Of course I use Google and Yahoo services.
But the question of My Space, isn’t really a question of My Space. It is much more a question about “what is design?” At least that is how my interviewer really implied the question and definitely how I inferred it. It was really couched in the whole idea of “ugly sites” and the success of ugly.