Why no love for brown?
It's been about a month since I deployed a bunch of new HTML on Whirlpool, an important change from a web standards perspective, but controversial within its chattering class.
From my perspective, the overhaul serves a number of purposes:
- Bring the presentational HTML up to modern standards
- Improve accessibility for vision impaired people
- Reorganise and refactor a large amount of old programming
- Pave the way for small screen support (e.g. iPhone)
Not a big difference, really. Yet there's a large difference behind the scenes. A lot of Whirlpool's infrastructure is more than six years old. That might not seem long to you paleontologists, but to us web developers, that's enough time for even the best intended code to look utterly embarrassing.
It's not as if I can just download and deploy a new version of phpBB and immediately benefit from a bevy of bullet point features. Well, I could — if I was no longer serving a million database powered pages per day with a pair of four year old servers. But that's beside the point.
The site exists for a number of reasons, and not all of them are philanthropic. High up the list is the personal challenge, plus in a small way, an ongoing sense of pride at a job well done.
Any project that involves multiple people is prone to involve some disagreement. Disagreement is healthy in moderated doses. Not so much when hundreds of people declare themselves involved and spend more time in the meta-conversation than seems appropriate. And not so much when the topic is aesthetics, which is arguably not a sport for large groups.
I'm inclined to dwell on the perennial question asked by any benevolent community leader: who owns the community? The question sounds decidedly zen — until it's given even a moment's thought. Whirlpool and its community exist in a symbiotic relationship which need each other to survive. Both have expectations from each other, and both are renewable resources.
As long as Whirlpool continues to serve its core purpose, issues like brown will remain irrelevant.
17 comments
I think the new WP design is quite slick, as each design has been over the years, and it must feel great to roll out some nice new code too... If brown is all that's controversial then I think it's been a good month :)
I think brown was picked on as something to complain about. Most people I've talked to seem to have gotten used to it by now.
Just disgruntlement in the face of change, I reckon.
@Loctorak - I think you are spot on. People want something to complain about, so they pick the brown. Keep going strong Whirlpool and Simon... we need you!
To me; the dark brown revisited the Threadwatch sidebar alert, which I'd become quite used to.
To others, I'm sure it was more of a shock.
People, the plebicite, are always prepared to be react. I get the feeling that some of us are just drumming our fingers, waiting for the chance to fire off at the next perceived betrayal.
Leaders suck it in and move on.
"Brown" is not the issue. There are many well designed websites which have used browns successfully.
To quote Wikipedia:
"A straw man argument is an informal fallacy based on misrepresentation of an opponent's position. To "set up a straw man" ... is to describe a position that superficially resembles an opponent's actual view but is easier to refute... "
Among the many messages which reject the new design for Whirlpool, there are only a small minority who simply say "I don't like brown". Those few members are not sufficiently aware of the reasons for their own negative reactions to the new design. They are not articulate enough to explain "I don't like the way browns have been used in this context" so it is easy to trivialise them.
Selecting the least articulate critics uses the "straw man" trick to evade the more detailed criticisms made by other writers about how the brown is used, the juxtaposition with dark blue, the dark brown side borders, etc.
People are creatures of habit, and can be somewhat resistant to change.
It perhaps didn't matter so much that the chosen colour was brown, but that it was something new, different and unfamiliar.
It may be a case of a vocal minority at play.
I really could not be fussed either way. Whirlpool is whirlpool and its about the community not the design :P
Looks like someone likes http://www.haveamint.com/ ... Inspired by Shaun Inman, eh? Oh, there's Dax. Le font du jour of the commercial world. Although it seems that Helvetica Neue is making a comeback. Myriad has become the next Arial, so overused and abused that it's lost what made it nice to begin with due to it being the default font in all Adobe design apps.
Anyway, it's not an irrational hatred of brown that people have. In my opinion, it's its heavy handedly use in the new design. The tones, saturation and so forth feel dusty, dark and lifeless. The old design used cool blues and greys, tempered with the warmth of orange for highlights. Sure, the logo was a bit bizarro by that stage, but at least it had character and humanity - something I feel the new design is lacking. It's trying too hard to be cool - just like Shaun Inman's current website which I feel is over-designed just to show off a grid structure that he liked.
However, the visual styling should not mean the actual underlying changes to WP go unnoticed or unappreciated. The use of CSS-based layout, cleaned up navigation, greater consistency between the differing areas of WP are all showing great progress. As one well versed in the ways of CSS, I can see a lot of time and effort has gone into the technical changes to the presentation layer, which is to be commended.
As far as the WP design goes though, it has reached what could be considered a self-indulgent stage. I'd contrast this to when The Daily WTF rebranded itself as Worse Than Failure, because the site owner was worried about explaining the acronym to his grandmother. When objectivity kicked in some months later, he realised that The Daily WTF was what had clicked with his actual site visitors (not his grandmother) and duly reinstated the name.
I feel that we'll be going down a similar path, though as an evolution rather than regression, in the years to come... especially once we get past the "large text and lots of subtle colour changes and rounded corners because we love Apple's design" ideology. Don't worry, a lot of designers seem to go through this - let's just hope we come out the other side sooner rather than later :)
@DarkOwl - Wow, haveamint does look similar... but rest assured this design was conceived without its influence.
As for the typesetting, I personally detest Dax. Narrow, wonky, yuck! The heading is typeset with the incredible about-face (no pun intended) which is Daxline. What can I say? I'm a sucker for a neo-grotesk with optically strokes and balanced contrast.
Getting back to brown, I understand where you're coming from, but I think you're still falling into the trap of comparative critique. Not that it isn't valid to do so, but my goal isn't to "one-up" my last effort. In fact the biggest goal was to improve maintainability and consistency — two sides of the same coin. Remember, this entire site (design, technology, implementation) is built with one man's spare time.
The 'new' Whirlpool logo and logotype was actually designed a couple of years ago (I have the CD-R backups to prove it!), and has even been seen in a few places, including past broadband surveys. (Here's the logotype used in 2005: http://whirlpool.net.au/survey/2004/) The treatment (gradients, etc) is recent though, and is inevitably a product of its time.
Simon, one of the changes that happened about this time was the loss of the comments link at the bottom of news articles if you come in via the RSS feed... Since you say you changed a lot behind the scenes I'm guessing this happened then.
Can we have that back? It's really annoying having to load the article twice.
I love the new design, and feel that whilst it was strange at first the improvements are amazing.
I like the new although there are aspects of the old that I miss (for some reason I was quite attached to the old inbox icon for new whims).
The only issue is page scaling when reading on the iphone. It's erratic and I've tried to narrow down the cause (linking from a zoomed page etc) but can't seem to see a pattern.
I'm sure you're already onto it.
Thanks for the site.
I've never really understood the issue with brown.
They are all wearing it on the streets, its like the new black.
Like someone Johnno said, it was just the obvious to pick on because it was new and could be seen..the vocal minority had a bunch of meandering sheep behind them.
Funny how nooone really picked on the new HTML or CSS, just.. the .. colour.
who owns the community?
in this case, it's the Benevolent Dictator!
LOL - My brother-in-law sent me a pair of brown shoes from China - I requested black shoes. He sent brown ones, explaining that he wore brown, and that they were more comfortable than black ones he had tried. I'm now adjusting my life to comfortable brown shoes :)
Yeah.. The new design looks MUCH better than the brown..
Good Work Simon!
Brownie points for the design - but why are the top parts of the site transparently superimposed on my tiny Nokia N78 screen? (I bought this gadget from the pensioner bonus - don't tell Rudd & Co - so I could spend the cold winter mornings snuggled up in bed checking out The Answers to (almost) everything... In fact I told my long-suffering wife the N78 was my 'bed computer').
Cheers,
and nice to meet you!
Rgds,
LMH