Here’s three things I ran across today that just bug the hell out of me. Please refrain from these things when you design.

• No padding whatsoever: When I refer to padding, I’m talking about the space between an object and the object’s container. For example, the text inside of a DIV. When the DIV has really low padding, everything seems really cramped together, and when it has really high padding, things start to look all over the place. Here’s an example:

  

  This could be fixed very easily with 10 or 15 pixels of padding. Content would have more room to breathe, and I’d probably stick around to check out the site.

• Sticky notes: While they do have their place (say, on a web site about sticky notes, or something of the like), I don’t quite understand how this:

  

  ..made it’s way in there. What exactly is the point of the sticky note? Is there some kind of life-changing message that you had to make stick out like a sore thumb just so people would read it? This gets most websites a thumbs-down from me.

• HUGE rounded corners with a large stroke: Sorry guys, but not many people liked this 5 years ago, and that’s not changing:

  

  To me this just feels bloated and chunky, and the inner glow screams “I’ve been using Photoshop for 5 hours, look what I made!”.

Please guys, this stuff just looks bad (no offense to the designers of these sites, if you really want the images removed I will).

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11 Responses to “Three Web Design Peeves”

1. matt Says:
   April 8th, 2007 at 12:12 pm

   I agree, those things really bother me too….Especially the “no padding”.

2. Vicki Says:
   April 8th, 2007 at 9:35 pm

   The design studio that created bluestarointment.com won a gold ADDY award from the American Advertising Federation for the web site in 2005, one of the most distinguished design competitions.

   I assure you those rounded corners were placed there by concept, not by 5 hours of using Photoshop. Research antique designs of medicine labels and tonic bottles and you can get a feel of what the designers have achieved.

3. matt Says:
   April 8th, 2007 at 11:46 pm

   I think that website is ugly, rounded corners + border FTL

4. TylerL Says:
   April 9th, 2007 at 12:00 am

   Vicki, I can respect the research that goes into designs like Bluestarointment, but the fact remains that it just doesn’t look good. No matter how brilliant the idea behind a design is, if it’s ugly then I won’t stick around.

5. Jamie Says:
   April 9th, 2007 at 3:07 am

   Excellent article Tyler! Some of your points are down to earth and a hit on the nail. Really nice

6. Vicki Says:
   April 9th, 2007 at 3:13 am

   It’s fine if your personal aesthetic is especially sensitive to things like post-its and large rounded corners, but what concerns me is the fact you are asking others to refrain from these solutions altogether and implying a sort of “no exceptions” policy.

   Creativity is a great commodity these days and being able to place oneself outside of the box is all the more difficult without an open mind. Otherwise all your work begins to look more and more alike as we place standards on ourselves instead of pushing great design. Followers of Paul Rand were surely repulsed by David Carson’s typography, but look at how breaking the rules revolutionized magazine design in the last decade.

7. TylerL Says:
   April 9th, 2007 at 11:18 am

   I’m asking people to refrain from these peeves of mine because I believe that the general feeling towards them aren’t positive. My taste in aesthetics may be different than the next person’s, but in this case I think we can make an exception.

   On another note, I remember hearing about a logo created by Paul Rand recently. A university hired for a (very) large sum of money and the final product actually made me laugh. As inspired or researched as the piece might have been, the amount of work that went in to actually creating the logo didn’t warrant t he price tag. Do you by any chance know the name of the university?

8. Vicki Says:
   April 9th, 2007 at 6:58 pm

   I honestly don’t know. The only university logo I know of that Paul Rand designed is the one for Yale.

9. collis Says:
   April 12th, 2007 at 6:51 pm

   No Padding always annoys me, as does no leading on text, unfortunately CSS defaults to a very close line seperation

10. Marcus Says:
    April 21st, 2007 at 10:29 am

    Didn’t Paul Rand pass away in 1996?

11. jon Says:
    May 24th, 2007 at 10:10 am

    wtf - generalizing that most don’t like rounded corners, i don’t buy it.

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