Comments on: MySpace: Is ‘ghetto’ a design choice?

By: Abigail

Abigail — Wed, 07 Sep 2005 08:10:25 +0000

Myspace rocks!It’s the fact that you can design your own page and the more u surf myspace the more you learn how to make your page better. It’s totally addictive.

By: orlando

orlando — Wed, 07 Sep 2005 04:29:19 +0000

get more chicano art or lowrider art stuff

By: susan

susan — Wed, 07 Sep 2005 03:25:57 +0000

why am i posting a commet??

By: shelby

shelby — Tue, 06 Sep 2005 19:25:04 +0000

um check out my myspace just go to search and go to shelby menotti request to be my friend

By: Victor Ramirez

Victor Ramirez — Sun, 04 Sep 2005 17:29:50 +0000

check it!

http://www.myspace.com/ikickedapanda

using CSS you can make a cleaner profile. Ok, i’m not a design master, but i think it is nice

By: Starr Stultz

Starr Stultz — Fri, 02 Sep 2005 16:27:22 +0000

I was looking at this for an article about the Myspace Craze at my school, but none of this information seems to be in anyway irrelevant to anything about myspace, just how the design is “ghetto” for one I do not get how it is ghetto! I have an account and some of the designs are very clever a mixture of simple codes to make the design more complex many examples through the site! Make sure to email me about this because I am just 16 and I would love to see this concept before I do a complete article in a paper about Myspace when I do not understand a lot of the information given in most sites about Myspace.
Thank You

By: JC

JC — Thu, 01 Sep 2005 21:55:39 +0000

I guess it comes down to this…. Pretty is distracting. Ugly gets the fluff out of the way. At least, as long as it doesn’t get IN the way.

By: Jonathan Lambert

Jonathan Lambert — Thu, 01 Sep 2005 21:45:54 +0000

I have to comment on this one.

Yes, ugly sells. Yes, ugly works. I have had so many conversations with people over the years, as a programmer and owner of a business that helps folks deal with content, about this very subject.

It has been my experience that ugly design can sell products well, motivate people to do things, and overall be an effective modus for communication.

I’ve done a LOT of legit email marketing. This is generally typical abc comparison stuff. I was FLOORED when the professionally designed templates done by several in-house designers got their open and click-through rates consistently handed to them in a hat by emails that were running as controls and consisted of no more than straight hacked-up html 4 code.

How is this possible? Well, the obvious answer is the conclusion hinted here — that ugly sells. But I think that’s missing the point.

There might be (and this was my experience) something that “ugly” web design has that is sorely lacking in the modern template web design arena (not just web standards templates, but just in general). Specific things I looked at, but didn’t have a large enough sample to really find out include:

density of information (kerning, etc)
location of information (on the page, above the fold)
font readability (times has been around a long time for a reason)
historical “just used to it” kind of things
colors are usually all pretty basic

One of the interesting tests I did was to compare two slightly different emails, one with a beautiful graphic header and one without, and overall, the one without the header tended to perform better, when when a blank image was included where the header would have been (same send size). So… how is this possible?

There is a lot of research that needs to be done in this area. There must be some cogsci explanation for my experiences with the mailings, and the phonomenon of “ugly design”.

- Jonathan Lambert

By: daniel

daniel — Thu, 01 Sep 2005 15:05:10 +0000

I wrote a similar blog entry a while back…altho maybe more sarcastic…making it my URL on this comment…

By: Joe Clay

Joe Clay — Tue, 30 Aug 2005 08:14:32 +0000

Myspace is abhorrent. I only wish I had come up with the idea myself a while ago. I could’ve implemented it way better and probably gotten more money out of the deal :)

The real reason that it functions isn’t because of features or things like that. It’s that it makes it easy to start with. Then you get bored one day and you learn how to code it. I got sucked in because someone put me on there for a project. The only reason I ever went back was because I found out my girlfriend had a profile on there because people she knew were only on that and not on facebook (which is leaps and bounds better than myspace, even before their redesign).

Facebook would enjoy more popularity if it allowed more pictures and community colleges. I guarantee that. I almost offered to redesign facebook, back in the day. I never got around to it :)