1. Although the Web seems like it’s been around for a long time, it’s very new historically. Technological innovations are always driven by technology first – design comes later. Think of Henry Ford’s Model T that was hugely successful, even though it came in only one style and color. When GM later introduced a variety of models, colors and designs, they rapidly gained market share. Ford was completely baffled by this because the GM cars weren’t any better at transporting people. Think of the success Apple has had with the iPod. It doesn’t really play MP3s any better than other players, but it’s design very much appeals to it’s market.

2. For MySpace, design is an answer to a problem that doesn’t currently exist. They are the only real players in a totally new category and kids have no other choices at this point.

3. Web design is fundamentally different from traditional media. Design for the Web encompasses not just graphics, but navigation and ease of use. It conflates graphic design with environmental and product design. This process has not yet matured.

4. A static designed Web 1.0 crashed on it’s own hype. Web 2.0 is emerging as a dynamic, interactive environment, not just a series of cool pages. The current volatile transformation of online media – music, film, TV, etc. – will morph into a very design-driven industry once the technology and business components shake out and settle down.

This is a shameless plug, I know, but we launched a social community trying to keep visual aesthetics in mind while promoting an idea we believed in. Jumping on the web 2.0 bandwagon of gradients, reflections and making everything as bubbly as possible was not how we wanted to join the web 2.0 world!

Consider human nature: when a person goes out to a bar or a party, they want to look good. Looking good to them trumps the look of the place they are going. People, like websites, want eyeballs looking at them. These social websites understand their users because they pay more attention to them than they do to their own notions of what ought to be. And so they have put resourses into letting the user’s determine how they, the users, are percieved by virtue of how they “customize” their page.

The notion of visual design must first be filtered by the idea of user-centric design.

Some sites know when just to stay out of the way. Myspace has such huge brand gravity because they have had the discipline to cater to what is important to their users.

Consider that if myspace was slick and shiny, how would that have affected the perception of their brand. The genius of myspace is that they either had the insight and guts, or the ignorance and luck to let the user’s do all the branding work for them. And branding in a social setting is all about personal customization.

It is highly important for anyone involved in the creative process to have an bird’s eye view of the whole experience. As words, visual desing carry a highly semantic value for the user. Experience and visual should not live in a divide or disconnect. But on the contrary should be developed in parallels feeding from each other.

About myspace. Most ppl are stuck within a system they have put so many hours and effort to develop. It is the first time many have been able to gain a presence in the internet and to visualize a community. Its “stickiness” for this two reasons is incredible. A rigid system that works 80% of the time which locks users and their communities. Although it is poor in execution the effort to move you and your community into a new system overcomes the frustration of usability issues like the image upload… for example.

One design issue that has some importance for such sites is usability and here MySpace passes by the skin of it’s teeth.

If you look at Google Calendar which is also a social site/webapp you’ll see that attention to detail and design is not lacking, well not as much as MySpace. In fact Google Calendar would most likely have failed if they hadn’t put in the extra effort. This is in part due it’s branding and their applications look and feel need to at least match this. But because it’s primary focus is as a personal app with social capabilities it’s interface requires a high level of quality in design and production. This is clearly a case where quality itself is a major appeal.

The dotcom era, roughly, was when people first started really caring about what a web page looked like visually (e.g., starting with Netscape 3.0 and the visual layout capabilities of HTML tables and images). But, then the dotcom bust really opened a lot of people’s eyes to how little “high” visual appeal correlated with successful websites / web companies.

I think visual design always matters, but it’s also always subject to fashion trends. Low design is always more widely accessible to individual’s fashion tastes than high design (and, low design tends to be more practically usable).

In general, the web is still very textual, and it’s fashionable and practical (think: bluejeans) to produce sites where some kind of readability is the dominant goal of the visual design.

MySpace works visually in that in allows individuals to do their own designs: each MySpace reflects some individual’s visual aesthetic / fashion.

But, to the degree that visual design is communication design, or experience design, or information design, etc., the larger the website, the more likely there are specialists representing some or all of those rolls, and the role of the “visual designer” might be more limited to look and feel / emotional design.