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posted by Fnord666 on Thursday May 14 2020, @07:24AM   Printer-friendly
from the which-witch-is-which? dept.

Is it because websites are converging on what boosts search rank? Or maybe there is a consolidation in the frameworks used to build web sites? Perhaps users gravitate to using sites whose layouts are "familiar"?

Yes, websites really are starting to look more similar:

Over the past few years, articles and blog posts have started to ask some version of the same question: "Why are all websites starting to look the same?"

These posts usually point out some common design elements, from large images with superimposed text, to hamburger menus, which are those three horizontal lines that, when clicked, reveal a list of page options to choose from.

My colleagues Bardia Doosti, David Crandall, Norman Su and I were studying the history of the web when we started to notice these posts cropping up. None of the authors had done any sort of empirical study, though. It was more of a hunch they had.

We decided to investigate the claim to see if there were any truth to the notion that websites are starting to look the same and, if so, explore why this has been happening. So we ran a series of data mining studies that scrutinized nearly 200,000 images across 10,000 websites.

[...] This outsize power is part a larger story of consolidation in the tech industry—one that certainly could be a cause for concern. We believe aesthetic consolidation should be critically examined as well.


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  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 14 2020, @12:34PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 14 2020, @12:34PM (#994206)

    CSS frameworks [getbootstrap.com] that really make the case CSS if not the entire layout model needs re-imagining from the ground up. There are simple things that CSS makes difficult, it's 2020 and we're still using hacks to get an element horizontally and vertically centered within a container. Frameworks are codifying the way designers do web layups. The other part is the rise of smaller screened devices (media in CSS terms) - something frameworks make easier to deal with so long as designers adhere to a reflowable box layout.

    It's not in itself a bad thing that web sites follow similar layouts as "mystery meat" and other "artistic" layouts of the late '90s will attest.

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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by DarkMorph on Thursday May 14 2020, @07:44PM (1 child)

    by DarkMorph (674) on Thursday May 14 2020, @07:44PM (#994361)
    Apparently you never heard of CSS3's Flex and Grid properties.
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 15 2020, @12:57PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 15 2020, @12:57PM (#994597)

      Apparently you never heard of CSS3's Flex and Grid properties.

      Bootstrap had grid support in 2012, when CSS3 grids were still a draft. [alistapart.com] Now reread...

      Frameworks are codifying the way designers do web layups.