Web design trends that I don't understand (part 1)

March 11, 2006

Every so often, I run into web design trends that I simply don't understand. Since I've already grumbled about small font sizes, today's contestant is the mysterious case of the vanishing links.

Technically they haven't vanished. Instead they've carefully been given a colour that is almost exactly the same as the regular text colour. Sometimes even exactly the same as the regular text colour. Ironically, in this situation the 'click here' style of link text actually becomes good, because it gives me valuable clues that there's something there to click.

I really don't get this sort of design. If the links are unimportant, why not just omit them? If you think that having any link colours in your nice text is ugly, why not just put all links in a 'resources' section at the bottom? Are there designers who actually think that 'color: #336699' is easily noticed when in the middle of 'color: #333'? (And that colour set is one of the more moderate examples. I've seen far worse.)

If you don't want me to use the links, why are you putting them in? If you do want me to use your links, why are you hiding them?

Someone please explain this. I'm lost.

Written on 11 March 2006.
« Why dynamic linking
Weekly spam summary on March 11th, 2006 »

Page tools: View Source, Add Comment.
Search:
Login: Password:
Atom Syndication: Recent Comments.

Last modified: Sat Mar 11 02:55:13 2006
This dinky wiki is brought to you by the Insane Hackers Guild, Python sub-branch.