Stick Figure Web Design

Posted on September 29, 2007
Filed Under Web Design |

We’ve been inaccurately describing our websites for years. I’m guilty of this transgression, just as you are. Our vocabulary for giving a snappy summary of websites has been limited to “Web 1.0″ and “Web 2.0″, and it’s just not enough to succinctly convey the choices web designers use when making a page.

Web 1.0 simply is the Internet without AJAX, folksonomies, collaborative news, RSS feeds, and wikis. Basically, Web 1.0 is the static content of the web, and Web 2.0 is the dynamic content. I’m grossly oversimplifying matters, but just play along.

Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 have also been used to describe the style of a site:

We Can Do Better

The dichotomy starts to break down when we start trying to apply these phrases to every web page we use in our daily lives. Digg and Reddit have similar functions, and both are Web 2.0 in that they are community driven. However, Reddit has what would traditionally be called a Web 1.0 design. Is Reddit a Web 2.0 or a Web 1.0 site? We eventually conclude that Reddit is a Web 2.0 site, but a nagging feeling in our brain tells us that somehow, it’s not in the same category as Digg. Like me, you probably beat down that nagging feeling by refreshing the page on cnn.com to see where Lindsay checked into rehab, but one must admit that the labels we commonly use just aren’t good enough to quickly describe the design decisions made by a site.

A coworker of mine, Tim, recently commented on the simplicity of someone’s home page by declaring it a “stick figure website”. This simple statement provides a great deal of insight into some of the design choices that were made: they were simple, and they were used more to provide information than presentation. As it turns out, placing”stick figure” and “artistic” on opposite ends of the qualitative continuum allows us to more accurately describe the style of a website.

The Meat and Potatoes

A purely stick figure website uses the bare bones of what HTML markup provides. Many of the tag attributes are left at default values, and images are used for headers and necessary content. They are not used as substitutes for what HTML could provide, and they are almost never used as a presentation tool. An artistic website, however, makes use of heavy CSS markup and image substitution for things like bullet points and titles. No stone is left unturned. Rounded corners are the norm, and the whole site has a consistent color scheme. Please note that these choices do not form a dichotomy, but rather a range of possibilities.

Websites that I used to make 3 or 4 years ago looked pretty nice, but they used table layouts (I’ve already pushed a rock up a hill for eternity, so lay off). The sites leaned heavily towards the stick figure side, but they could be said to have some artistic merit.

So What?

Playing off of this idea, we can combine descriptors to get a (slightly) more accurate view of choices that website designers make.

Google: Google’s front page is a Stick Figure Web 1.0 site. As far as I can tell, it is not very dynamic, and the layout is as simple as a web layout can be while still remaining tasteful. This is the ultimate example that sometimes, stick figures are all you need to get your point across beautifully.

Reddit: Reddit is a Stick Figure Web 2.0 site. The content on Reddit is entirely dynamic and community-driven, but the site clearly places more importance on the information than the presentation of the information. If you poke through the features of the site, you’ll find some AJAX requests being performed, but the clear design decision of the website was that it would stay as far out of your way as possible.

Digg: Digg.com is an Artistic Web 2.0 site. The team has obviously spent a good amount of time crafting the experience of how their users interact with the site. It is stylized with the latest of presentation fads: rounded corners, AJAX-fed displays, javascript fading, a new nested comment system, cheat codes, the whole shebang. To the Digg team, it’s not just important what you get from their site, it’s the experience that you have as you get it.

Personal Web Pages: Home pages of graphic artists and designers are frequently quite artistic, but without any kind of flash-bang driving the site. All they really need is a static page. However, they also need to get the point across that yes, they know exactly what they are doing when it comes to art. What better way than to style the dickens out of their website?

Now we have something that will, for example, lump Digg and Technorati into the same category. It will also leave Reddit related to the two of them, as they are all Web 2.0 websites. However, Technorati and Digg fall into the artistic category, but Reddit falls into the stick figure category. Joel on Software and Coding Horror are both stick figure blogs (yet again, showing that sometimes stick figures are all you need to get your point across beautifully), but they are in a different category from Engadget, which is an artistic blog.

It’s possible to riff on this theme forever. Old websites were no better than cave drawings, there was a Renaissance for the web where presentation became more important. Currently, we have the modern theory of web design, with different niches for different levels of artistic merit. All of them serve a purpose, and are decisions that web designers must go through when they consider their audience.


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Comments

2 Responses to “Stick Figure Web Design”

  1. Sold Out Activist on September 29th, 2007 10:01 pm

    My own blog is the epitome of a stick figure website with only a few artistic features that degrade peacefully. I used to spend a long time painfully building complicated websites for myself. And then one day I just stopped. Hell, my business website (http://www.soldoutactivist.com) is nothing but text now and all my new clients comment on the refreshing simplicity of it.

  2. Greg Molyneux on October 1st, 2007 6:16 pm

    Tim Mason would certainly be proud to know he was referenced in this blog. Knowing that he represents the one end of the ‘qualitative continuum’.

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