Tioti doesn’t just have tagging and RSS, it has “tagging and RSS up the yazoo”.
#Make visuals great again 2.0 free
WebTango isn’t just free, it’s “free of additives, cholesterol, ozone-depleting CFCs, and most importantly, free to use”. A List Apart singled out Flickr and Photojojo for an honorable mention in this department, and it’s a lesson that many Web 2.0 sites put into practice. Some Web 2.0 layouts are so minimal that they verge on boring, but designed well, an uncluttered page can be incredibly tasteful.įriendly, informal copywriting allows a more personal relationship with website visitors. Generous leading also makes text copy easier for the eye to follow. White space allows important information to stand apart, provides rest for the eye, and imparts a sense of calm and order. With a focus on legibility and ease of use, good use is made of white space. The layout of Web 2.0 sites might be described as minimal. Admittedly this craze for giant text strays too far into Jacob Nielsen territory for my taste – when a web page’s body text is set at larger than 13 point it looks like a “learning to read” book to me! And now that accessibility is cool, it’s possible to be a hotshot web designer and use enormous type. Large text is easy on the eye, and coupled with snappy copywriting makes information easy to absorb. Big is beautifulĪs far as Web 2.0 is concerned, bigger is definitely better. Smart use of layout, color, type and copy can go a long way towards easing the pain. A good Web 2.0 app ought to be lightweight and easy for users to grasp, and clever visual design and copywriting can help remove barriers to entry. Be it managing links with, sharing photos with flickr, or organizing tasks with Backpack, we have to familiarize ourselves with a new technological process and devote time to managing our content. Most Web 2.0 applications add an additional technological or organizational layer to the user’s web experience. 3D and beveled icons can lend elegance and polish to a page design that is otherwise fairly stark. Simple icons and screenshots are the order of the day when it comes to imagery on Web 2.0 sites. You won’t find any stock photography of smiling support staff on a Web 2.0 site – that’s a tactic favored by small companies trying to mimic large corporations. If that message can appear inside of the ubiquitous ‘starburst’, all the better. Most Web 2.0 sites devote prime real estate to the message that they offer a free service.
If you’ve got to convince visitors to sign up for your killer app, giving away FREE accounts surely can’t hurt. This smooth approach to type lends a modern playfulness to a company’s visual identity. In a great FontShop article analysing the logos of Web 2.0, it was clear that rounded typefaces are all the rage. The friendliness of rounded corners is in keeping with the comfortable, informal tone of many web 2.0 sites. New CSS techniques for achieving rounded corners have helped make this style hot again. Bold primary colors suggest a playful, fun attitude and also help to draw attention to important page elements. Green is the unofficial color of web 2.0, but saturated blues, oranges and pinks are also favourites. Green is the new greyīright, cheerful colors dominate Web 2.0 sites. Most Web 2.0 sites come across as friendly, approachable and small-scale, using subtle design decisions to gain our trust. Users can generate content for a web service, promote it in a “viral” peer-to-peer fashion, and improve it’s data quality through their opinions and preferences.īut to convince a visitor to contribute their time – and data – to a web application, you need to get them to trust you first. Integral to Web 2.0 is harnessing the input of website visitors. Wikipedia’s editors may not think it’s a worthy part of the Web 2.0 discussion, but I say bring it on! Let’s take a look at the some of the communication issues facing a Web 2.0 site, and see how the “Web 2.0 look” can help to solve them. Nevertheless, it’s true that many Web 2.0 sites do share a distinctive aesthetic.
The objection, I suppose, is that no set of visual criteria can accurately define something as being characteristic of Web 2.0 – if Web 2.0 can be understood as an approach to generating and distributing content, then it needn’t be tied to a particular visual style. Gradients, colorful icons, reflections, dropshadows, and large text all got a mention.Ī few days later the “visual elements” addition had been removed after a vote by wikipedians. If you didn’t blink, you may have noticed that for a few days recently Wikipedia’s entry for Web 2.0 included a subsection describing the visual elements of Web 2.0.