Articles on design issues, design tips and overviews

How Worldy is the World Wide Web?
Are all sites destined to become as similar as the fries you get at McDonald's? Or is there hope for humanity?

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Often it is the most irrelevant objects that are capable of stimulating the mind towards a new idea.

Edward De Bono

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English and McDonald's can be found -- more and more -- everywhere. But there are subtle variations in the taste of these hamburgers, just as you can find many types of English with specific accents, words and vocabularies: the British, the American, the Canadian, the Indian, the new Euro-pudding English ... So, the local traces are taking over and re-shaping a language which is the new Esperanto, the common interface among people.

English is not quite omni-present on the Web. And where other languages exist, the page aesthetics can be affected. Look at the design of Japanese web sites. They often offer completely different aesthetics, due primarily to the positioning of the typefaces. A Japanese house (a traditional, non-virtual one) offers circulation spaces based on tatamis, resulting in a specific day-to-day aesthetics. Idem with the sushis and the chopsticks. Chopsticks are the food enabler, the media. And the sushis were designed to make the content (the food) easily flow from the plate to the mouth. But what about eating noodles or rice then? Easy solution: still use the chopsticks, but bring the bowl close to the mouth. In the same way, their web sites reveal some Japanese specificities-- tatami and chopsticks, so to speak. (However, let's keep in mind the fashion of the French cuisine in Tokyo--allowing forks to take over.)

Even in the Wild West -- Europe -- web sites are often multilingual. This results in a design which has to fit this functionality. And if we look to sites only in English, you will find a difference between a US one, and its European counterparts. This is clearly the context making its contribution and confirming that the notions of functionality are different from country to country. If you add local taste to that, web site personalities and identities are strong. A French web site will definitely show a different visual ambience than, say, a Dutch site. What type of differences can we notice in the Franco-Dutch example? Here are some suggestions, which can be traced back to cultural difference between Germanic and Latin mentalities.

The Germanic are much more down-to-the-earth, practical, functional, while the French are more drowned in the word, the talk, the wine ... These may seem cliched, which they are, by the way. But they allow us to make the point of changing balance between mise-en-scene and functionality. A Dutch site is more efficient in delivering the information you are seeking. A French site will require you to better know the culture "en place" as more design elements are in the visual context, for example. Obviously, it is easy to find counterexamples of each point, but you can note trends, in a meta-reading of the Internet becoming a mass-media.

Another route to check the difference between the French and Dutch site is the approach to languages. French will skip the multilingual aspect as they usually speak only French, whilst the Dutch one will be Dutch- and English-oriented, or even English only. So, the cultural attitudes to functionality and information needs have implications in the design of web sites, implications that we only begin to apprehend, I assume.

Back to square one: 95% of the machines have the same OS, a very high percentage use the same web design software, so a very high percentage of web sites must have the same ambiance. No?

Fortunately, there is a natural influx in the design space, like in the fashion space, that should help us avoid becoming clones of each other. iMac, Palm Pilot, Psion are today the carriers of a mise-en-scene different from the homogeneous Windows icons.

Old stories, new media? Goodfellas and bad? Big Brother? The design is getting exciting days, because the feudal system has found its enemy: the Internet network. The key will be to balance global and local, the normalized and the heterogeneous. In the end, web sites will retain their local ambiance as the global phenomenon of the Internet is expressed in global localities.