February 24, 2011
just enough is more
A few months ago, Deron and I chatted about our philosophies on structuring clusterflock posts. I don’t remember all the specifics, but the phrase “just enough is more” stuck with me. The quote, itself, comes from a longer essay by Milton Glaser:
LESS IS NOT NECESSARILY MORE.
Being a child of modernism I have heard this mantra all my life. Less is more. One morning upon awakening I realised that it was total nonsense, it is an absurd proposition and also fairly meaningless. But it sounds great because it contains within it a paradox that is resistant to understanding. But it simply does not obtain when you think about the visual of the history of the world. If you look at a Persian rug, you cannot say that less is more because you realise that every part of that rug, every change of colour, every shift in form is absolutely essential for its aesthetic success. You cannot prove to me that a solid blue rug is in any way superior. That also goes for the work of Gaudi, Persian miniatures, art nouveau and everything else. However, I have an alternative to the proposition that I believe is more appropriate. ‘Just enough is more.’
I have zero formal training in design and until two years ago couldn’t tell you the difference between a typeface and font, but I’ve stared at enough websites in my time to understand just how true that statement is. My persistent frustration with most web design is that it doesn’t give me what I want or, for that matter, what the site seems to want to give.
Google ads, tag clouds, and excessive hyperlinks litter the page, forcing type smaller and smaller just so it can “fit above the fold.” Or, worse, the tl;dr Tumblr crowd who present us with nothing but acontextual photos and clever sentences from the first paragraphs of The New Yorker articles in large, bold, sans-serif type.
Fuck the fold. And fuck tl;dr. I like scrolling, I like long reads, and I like large (enough) type.
Thankfully, there are a number of fantastic websites that help the long reader’s cause. Long Reads, Longform, and The Browser rank among my favorites. (They do ethically what HuffPo et al. haven’t, incidentally.) But time and time again these sites send me (and it’s not their fault) to noisy pages, littered with ads and “useful” secondary content or an unstyled, printer-friendly page. So, I am forced to use an app like Readability, a very elegant side-step to the problem of unreadibility on the web, instead of reading the website itself.
This is systemically broken and needs to be fixed.
Unfortunately, since the web is a democracy in the most etymological sense (demos, “common people” + kratos, “rule, strength” ), a systemic solution to design woes becomes a systemic solution to common people. History, methinks, shows the obvious problem with that perspective and, consequently, forces us to use an exceedingly common, counterintuitive, and more inelegant method: make more noise.
You can find my first protestation here.
comments
Leave a Reply
Thank you for this post, Andrew.
I am off to your first protestation.
Love it.
Bravo.
Very well done.
Very well done indeed.
Thank-you, good sir.
I love it when people show how, and how well, they think here.
Thanks, walt. This whole thing has been sitting with me for sometime. It was bound to come out one way or another.
Such things stick in a filter of the mind until the right moment they come out. Thank you, Andrew.
I totally agree with you on Readability and “just enough is more”. Haven’t heard it expressed as well as the rug example, but that’s a very succinct argument. Now, I do tumbl, so I guess I also find use for the short pieces that link elsewhere.
But the whole concept of paginating an article (mostly for the purpose of allowing more ad impressions) seems ridiculous (that’s why web pages scroll, right?) and has been bugging me for a long time. I wish that could be quashed (maybe if enough people use AdBlock and Readability, they’ll stop paginating articles unnecessarily?).
Oh, and I have been enjoying using Readability for some years now, Andrew, and I think it was you who introduced me to it by way of a clusterflock post.
Fwiw, Casey, tumbling itself isn’t bad, it’s the broader tumblr culture and how they seem to use the web I don’t like. tl;dr seems to be the spirit of that place by my reckoning and I just can’t get behind that as a primary mode of expression. The best parts of clusterflock are when we don’t go the way of tumblr or, when a tumblr like post expands with gorgeous, hilarious, poignant comments.
Agreed, Andrew. It is very rare that Tumblr allows for the sort of interesting dialogue that happens on Clusterflock. Usually it’s just “like”, reblog, or move on. That’s all well and good for a picture of a kitten riding a tricycle, but it doesn’t really connect anyone or support having an attention span.
Well put, good sir.