Mick's World

Following on from my previous post Anti-Design is wrong, which basically started from a post i read on Airbag Industries about MySpace.

Mike Davidson has recently posted about the ugly design of MySpace, in particular the user profile pages. The article explains how users can go about making a good looking MySpace user page, with the example of Mike’s user page, which looks very nice indeed. He also includes the CSS file and images he used for the MySpace makeover to make it easy to learn from.

Several weeks ago, I finally signed up for an account, and within seconds I was instantly put-off by what had been created for me: a hastily-designed “profile page” with uninspired colors, misaligned tables, and a mish-mash of extraneous cruft and design elements which made this feel more like a halfway house than a “home”. Now, granted, I am a designer by trade so my tolerance for this stuff is orders of magnitude lower than most of the population, but clearly, this was not a place I even felt comfortable having my name on.

What he’s done looks great and is also cross browser compatible. I’d also have to agree with this quote:

But imagine what a service like this could be with a professional makeover. Get a company like Adaptive Path or a few Bryan Velosos in there and you could open up a whole new world of user enjoyment and customization.

 As Mike also says in the article, MySpace is doing something very right to have the usership they have, however a professional makeover would quite possibly make it that much more appealing. To the ‘Non-Anti-Designers’ anyway.