Does beauty have to involve difficulty in reading? I mean, maybe great beauty does involve not communicating a lot of factual information clearly. Great art and even beautiful print magazines generally don't do this.
Having the text all across the page did not make the information very accessible to me.
And going from the huge light-blue banner to the gray and white was actually rather jarring. It took me a minute to decide I had to scroll down to the text rather than clicking a "next" button or something.
And icons looked nice but like most icons were more eye-pleasing than actually communicative.
I'm surprised some people find it beautiful but I'll file it under "once interface design made computers (barely) usable, designers decided they had to make them unusable again (but now beautiful)". It's the world of "satisficing".
This is designers and programmers talking at cross purposes.
I don't know if I've been elated by a website lately but I'm a bit doubtful I'd even want to be. Mostly I want the useful information to go down easy without excess eye-strain and only then do I notice beauty (and naturally I prefer the understated version of beauty).
Wikipedia and hn are two of many examples of sites that are easy to read (though the text on hn is rather small, it's right for it's purpose since it makes threading easy).
I do have wall paper of great art if want to be inspired or elated but mostly I chose "real life" activities for my elation.
Having the text all across the page did not make the information very accessible to me.
And going from the huge light-blue banner to the gray and white was actually rather jarring. It took me a minute to decide I had to scroll down to the text rather than clicking a "next" button or something.
And icons looked nice but like most icons were more eye-pleasing than actually communicative.
I'm surprised some people find it beautiful but I'll file it under "once interface design made computers (barely) usable, designers decided they had to make them unusable again (but now beautiful)". It's the world of "satisficing".