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What is good web design? What are good aesthetics? There's a notion that extreme simplicity is best(black text on white background), or extreme geocities-style clutter. What people in these circles agree on is that modern, corporate web design is like kicking dead whales down the beach. There has to be more to it though than old-fashioned = good, modern = bad. Consider the two screenshots attached to this post. Neither is more "modern" than the other, yet a simple, subtle change in color scheme and font, makes a huge difference.

>consider the two screenshots attached to this post. Neither is more "modern" than the other, yet a simple, subtle change in color scheme and font, makes a huge difference. The color scheme didn't really make a difference, one is just slightly warmer than the other. I prefer the warmer one. It's not obvious which font I would prefer, both look fine to me. They're different but not in any meaningful way.

>>90081 consider the holly i love holly i agree with you, btw. i cant say i "like" one screenshot more than the other. it seems like a purely artistic choice. i think the core of what makes older design good was information density, efficiency in conveying that information, and how memorably it did so. that last part, i think, is what people often refer to as "soul". modern corporate web design wants "immersion" and an "experience" for the user, and they want it "universally appealing", whether for some vanity project or for the glory of Big Data, or they want to jam as much revenue generation as possible into a single click. big dreams and big dreams of cash often propel projects in this direction. classic web design emphasized the conveying of information, and the efficiency in doing so. after all, efficiency is exactly the problem that computers and networking was invented to solve. and i think this is a spectrum. like everything, soykaftifying the web is not a black and white endeavor, and there will be paradoxes if you're following my logic. its not perfect, and this is a complicated, mostly philosophical, subject. there very well can be vanity projects offering "immersion" that allow a degree of classic web charm, such as MySpace's custom CSS, because they stopped short of keeping everything "universally appealing". some example of that spectrum: - a free project from some freelance developers may be efficient and simple. just a vehicle of information. maybe the interface is spacey and bloated with nothing, maybe its compact. - a hobbyist site from Some Guy on the net may be a good experience as long Some Guy knows how to build a site. if they dont, at least it will be memorable. - a well funded but non-commercial project may be fancy and attempt to be appealing to everyone. maybe there's some unnecessary trendy UI/UX decisions but at least the implementation isnt being micro-controlled by a project manager in the interest of advertisers. - then there's projects funded by advertisers. you know how this goes. i'm sure you've seen the ad-ridden news sites - then theres projects part of the big tech scheme to enrich big data using as little funds to maximize returns from the advertisers also in on the gravy train, not to mention the shareholders. i know you know who belongs in this category. so, the two main factors that make a website soykaf: 1. appealing to as many people as humanly possible with a single UI/UX experience, often done using Big Data analytics as the metric, 2. the root of all evil. cash money. i think the current degree of digital soul sucking was a long time coming since the dawn of the dotcom bubble. the difference between now, 2012, and 1998 is the proliferation of big data and enhanced technology that enables such a high degree of "optimization" in favor of the Powers That Be.

The first image to me looks ten times better than the other one , It feels more centered and less of a stretched eyesore

>>90080 The social media widgets are too bright imo. Like a bright blue sky in an otherwise Austere but comfy page. Unless you're an artist or something that require managing followers i don't see why so much emphasis would be made. It just seems a bit stupid? to go trough the trouble of setting up a personal website only to advertise in high contrast someone's else.

>>90080 the first one looks more polished

>>90103 Pure black text, pure grays, and some stock, pixellated font, are not more polished. You guys just have bad taste.

Good web design starts with typography principles: making it easy for a reader to follow your text and consume information. You can learn a lot about web design by pulling out your local newspaper and observing how they arrange articles.

>>90080 >What is good web design? The one that is best for conveying the kind of information you want to convey. An art-focused website might wanna have more images and visual stuff going on. A tech blog might wanna have less of that, and worry more about how the text is formatted. A techy art blog, or an artsy tech blog could be a mix of both. Something that is neither techy or artsy could be something else entirely. >What are good aesthetics? Idk, whatever looks good or cool or cute or intelligent or trashy or whatever you want me to think about it. If you want it to look like X, and it looks like X, then it's good aesthetics, or at least it's correct based on what you want it to be. I don't think it's that complicated. >There has to be more to it though than old-fashioned = good, modern = bad. There is. The "notion" you're talking about is actually that people want websites to say what they mean and to mean they say, communicating that through an honest aesthetic and writing, one that the author is personally fond of. "Extreme simplicity" and "extreme geocities-style clutter" just so happens to be what people in these circles actually want to communicate. It doesn't necessarily mean that those are a universal "best". If you like 2020's corporate android-looking web design full of Javascript, and you actually mean it, then by all means go for it. But people here tend to not like that, so they won't make their websites look like that. By the way, I prefer the first picture. The warmer gray feels easier on my eyes than the cooler one, but both look good and work equally well with the layout. Text is easy to read and follow on both, but I prefer the slightly bigger font in the first picture.

Good web design died with the death of 4:3. Now everyone is just pretending.

>>90255 What do aspect ratio have to do with anything? Only weirdoes open programs in fullscreen on wide monitors anyway.

>>90256 >Only weirdoes open programs in fullscreen on wide monitors anyway. glitterboy detected

>>90080 Right is more modern because of the font usage, left is using arial which is more default and standard

I like when web designers apply game theory to their websites. Some instances: >https://vole.wtf/ >https://nonzerosum.games/

>>90080 >What is good web design? I like the classless css approach. Something like yorha css https://metakirby5.github.io/yorha/ or sakura css https://oxal.org/projects/sakura/demo/ people come to your website for the content so as long as the aesthetic is pleasing and not distracting, it's good

>>90080 Too much bloat, consider this instead >based.cooking

Imo, good web design has lots of anime girls everywhere, a mandatory chud meme every 1600dp, and it doesn't matter if the content is dense or not, after all, retard-moe is real, as long as it's fun to read I'm reading. I'm willing to make an exception though, the site can literally use the default CSS of the browser, and be completely lineal, as long as it is a critique against bloated corpo sites. If boxes are gonna be round, they musn't be too round, only a border radius of like 5, and if they're gonna be completely sharp and have no radius, they should have a good color contrast and border thickness, if you figure those out it can still look soft instead of looking high contrast.

>>91511 Sorry for double posting but I forgot something very very important, a site is a 0/10 if it has ads or trackers. It is physically impossible to put the evil spirit of ads on anything without its soul withering away in real time, and if a site wants to track you it probaly doesn't deserve your attention (I might be too butthurt about trackers though, they might have legitimate uses).

have you seen dr. cat's site? https://drcat.fun/ i'd consider this perfect web design. he's flipped around what a hacker's site should be, and constantly brings it towards being an OS in your browser (kind of like copy's stuff) afaik he also posted a generator for that sort of thing, but i forgot the link

>>92941 Yeah I've seen this one before and I have to admit it's an out of the box way of going about making a website, refreshing. >>91477 >yorha css That looks disgusting , good webdesign should be legible text no? the other one you posted is nice >>91317 Zerosum games is absolutely bless of a site >>90256 I open on fullscreen when I have no other programs especially on a wm , I don't sit there with screenfetch and anime pictures surrounding my programs

it's all about the relationship you have with the website. it's common to associate corporate stuff with bad stuff. and since corporate websites tend to be formulaic it's easy to recognize them. for similar reason we perceive old-fashioned design as being good. it's because of nostalgia, good memories, or seeing old-school stuff through pink glasses. my conclusion is that you can make the most fabulous design in the world and it won't matter if people do not have good time on your website. but you can copy the design of websites on which people had good time, so that they associate your design with something positive, and therefore see it as good design.

>>92941 >blank page Why does it seem like so many people can't into hypertext? >>91317 >https://vole.wtf/ >click on link >it moves away Test your soykaf ffs >>92971 >I open on fullscreen when I have no other programs especially on a wm , I don't sit there with screenfetch and anime pictures surrounding my programs You don't take notes?

>>92974 blank page? I had scroll up, it's a shell prompt. Don't really like JS interfaces. Web 1.0 is good design, except framesets

>>92975 And to elaborate: JS is only great when it works. In light limited browsers it often doesn't. (pale moon) Web 1.0 is mostly plain documents, great for user styling and accessibility. It may be just me preferring uniformity. I had once an idea that CSS should be split into vital & decorative rules, the latter of which you turn off to get reader mode view. Framesets are like kicking dead whales down the beach since they break browser history.

>>92941 Wonderful site and I've seen similar approaches of imitating the CLI. I wonder how he maintains it and writes new content like blogposts. In the process of wanting to redo my own website I'm totally stumped on the content management part. I can just use Hugo or whatever since I'd mostly be writing blogposts but it seems like it could be too limiting. Every "static site generator" seems to suck in one way or another. But I also don't really want to spend all my time maintaining my website's theming instead of actually writing content for it. https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com another one I like.