Crap Blog Junk Design Vomit: Some Thoughts on MySpace Design

As the online community grows, blossoms and matures, little sub-communities are beginning to form. These smaller "towns" or "communes" of the online world seem to form around various services. The Seton Hill blogosphere is one of these communes; Facebook is another. And while most of these communes all fit under a standard style and category, there is one that breaks all the rules. One that is as popular as it is hated. One called MySpace.

This strange amaglamation of Facebook, blogs, message boards, Windows Media Player and Flickr is a land that a sane man would never venture. It's an outlaw town, a ghetto of perfunctory design that assaults almost every one of our senses--if it had an odor, it would be that of a rotting corpse covered in Dollar Store cologne. It's a beast that has yet to be tamed, and has actually grown wilder as the years go by. And despite the best efforts of those who avoid it like the plague, MySpace is seeping into the online culture, have a greater influence as the days go by.

But what is it that makes this monster so crazed yet so attractive? Why do students, adults, bands, movie stars and sexual predators all flock happily to its blue login page?

It can't be the design. There is no way that anyone could be attracted to the design of a MySpace page. To save you from actually having to go there and see one for yourself, I'll describe it for you in gory, vivid detail.

Firstly, each page is supposed to follow a rather bland, generic layout, but thanks to many MySpace page editors, you can screw things up all you like. At the top of every page is a nice list of Google ads, which seem to have invaded every blog and news site in the world (except this one, folks!) Below that, you can often find the picture of the "author"-- the norm seems to be either a terribly grainy photo of someone looking away from the camera (perhaps shielding her eyes from the ugly MySpace page) or an anime drawing of a magical pixie. Neither of these photos are realistic... but we'll let that go for now (since I am not a dictator, but clearly have a picture of me dressed like one on this very page).

If you've lingered on the MySpace page long enough to notice the Google ads and the stupid photo and loud, obnoxious music hasn't started playing, consider yourself lucky. Kids now have the option of making an MP3 play whenever you visit their page. It's great if you want to scare the crap out of an unsuspecting reader, or make their browser crash.

But if you can survive the random music playing, then you are in for a real treat. Long lists of bands, movies, and books that the author enjoys, complete with large-format JPGs that take forever to load, even on a T1 line. And if you look to your right, you'll see a message board where her friends can leave messages. Thank God people aren't just limited to simple text messages, what is this 1998? No, you can post desktop-sized pictures that break the frame of the page, causing a horizontal scroll bar (the bane of any web-surfer's existence) to appear. Better yet, you can even post a video clip, so that every time a person visits the page, the entire loading process slows down to a crawl in order for you to view a scene of someone falling off a skateboard or getting hit in the junk with a croquet mallet. This is the height of online communication.

To top it all off, like a beetle-infested cherry, the user may have decided to change the background of the page, adding in a cryptic pattern that makes everything nigh-impossible to read. If they're smart, they made the font color only a shade off from the background, so you have to highlight everything with your pointer so that you can read it. Just think of yourself as an adventurer discovering the Rosetta Stone and you're brushing it off for the first time, wondering what the heck you have just discovered. A Rosetta Stone that plays a Gorillaz song while pictures leapt outside of the stone borders.

It's as if someone took all of the HTML design elements possible on the web, loaded them into a shotgun, and blasted them on to a MySpace page. Where ever they land, they stay, regardless of who they take out in the process.

If the design is so ugly, and if it crashes browsers left and right, why do people continue to flock to MySpace? The fact that many of the most popular bands on the planet are there doesn't help. At first, bands had online diaries, then blogs and message boards, now MySpace. Worse yet, there are barely limits imposed on people on MySpace. While I'm not saying there should be, there are certainly less rules and limits than Facebook or within an academic blog. You're free to say (almost) anything you want, post whatever picture you want (no matter how revealing), and list as many Dan Brown books as you please.

Am I being too critical of MySpace? Can't I just let these people go about their online lives, enjoying what they have and make the best out of it? No. It's my duty to point this stuff out! It's in my blood as a graphic designer, a blogger, and a student in a generation of New Media.

There are so many wonderful online communication tools out there. While would you want to pick the one that looks like HTML vomit stirred in with loud music and dancing GIFs? Unless, of course, you like that sort of thing.