I miss the colors

[nana7828]

Today i entered in the pokemon.com site on wayback machine on 1999 this was so pretty,coloroful Like the geocities and neocities ones
Nowadays the site looks so blank and White like everything in the corporative web.
I remember the playstore in the mid-2010s was green,Nowadays WHITE and ugly blue....Where are the colors? 
Ive seen others site on the wayback machine too.

[xixxii]

well, it's a store. it makes sense for a store to be plain-looking, since the point of it is to sell things to as many people as possible, which means they need to make it simple and easy to look at and navigate. there are lots of colorful websites that aren't stores. for example there are nearly 850 websites in the melonland surf club. what kind of websites are you looking for specifically? do you want recommendations?

[Melooon]

well, it's a store. it makes sense for a store to be plain-looking

I would say this is a very false assumption; plain does not equal accessible, that's a myth that I feel has been sold to people for the sake of companies saving on development costs. There's a really rich history of physical stores having lavish decor, and in almost all cases the reason they stop is simply because they cant be bothered to maintain it 

There is a conflict between the direction of homepages and of corporate pages that's hard to reconcile; homepages are great, but there's nothing wrong with enjoying a company product too and wanting to get an exciting web experience from that company just like you'd expect from a personal site!

Its sad that companies don't really have very much respect for the web as a medium or for their own creations as genuinely culturally valuable things that should be maintained instead of whitewashed However I don't think there's much that will ever change that. If you give your heart to a corporation, it can't give you anything back 

[xixxii]

I would say this is a very false assumption; plain does not equal accessible, that's a myth that I feel has been sold to people for the sake of companies saving on development costs. There's a really rich history of physical stores having lavish decor, and in almost all cases the reason they stop is simply because they cant be bothered to maintain it 

more than accessibility i meant that the principle is more like how everybody says you "have to" paint houses white and grey and beige before selling! having as neutral a background/environment as possible and trying to give off no particular impression is part of trying not to alienate anybody. sticking to one or two Brand Colors and as little styling as possible online helps with that. it also means that people have less to look at that isn't Your Products! eyes gotta be on the prize for maximizing profits. 0.5 seconds someone spends looking at a purely decorative banner is 0.5 seconds they're not looking at Products!

there's nothing wrong with enjoying a company product too and wanting to get an exciting web experience from that company just like you'd expect from a personal site!

on that point we just disagree; i think there is something wrong with that! a company isn't a person and i do not think anyone should want or expect to get anything from a company that they would want or expect from a person (whether that be care and consideration, a coherent artistic vision, emotional connection, a point of view, or whatever else)

[Melooon]

paint houses white and grey and beige before selling

That's a super different kind of sale though, with a house you are selling the potential for people to make it their own, whereas with a product you are selling that products aesthetic - a house is the product and you give it meaning, whereas a shops job is to give its products meaning ~ I think that can be both good and bad, it can sell you stuff you don't need, but it can also push you towards buying better things (thinking about my market again verses the local supermarket that I avoid ~ one makes me smile and the other stresses me out )

i do not think anyone should want or expect to get anything from a company

That's a sensible approach to things and I do not disagree with it at all! However I don't think it's the reality for the average person. A lot of people are deeply emotionally invested in the products they interact with and they don't separate the idea of emotion towards a person verses emotion for a product, because that product is part of their personality. I don't think that's bad; its part of human nature, but it can be abused and misused too. I think there's a balance; people need to be emotionally responsible and maintain a healthy distance with the products they love, but I also think that companies should respect the emotion that people invest into them ~ in the line of the topic, I feel that maintaining a site that fits peoples emotional connection with a thing is a kind of respect!

@nana7828 ooph, I feel like this is a deeper chat than maybe you were expecting! It sounds like Pokemon is important to you because its bright and colorful, and that has meaning; and the modern site design is letting you down because its not living up to that meaning ~ I don't know if you're right or if the web designer is right, or if your both right ~ but that feeling important all the same!

[Kallistero]

well, it's a store. it makes sense for a store to be plain-looking, since the point of it is to sell things to as many people as possible

Counterpoint: in-game microtransactions stores! They're often predatory & I don't think they're used as a great business practice too often, but they have some of the traits we're looking for. They're colorful, they can try to capture the expression of the game, they come in all sorts of different formats, and they're definitively made to sell things to people. A lot of them are even owned by corporations!

It dovetails with my statements in the threads on game-UI inspiration for webcraft and creativity in professional sites:

One of the common critiques (including some of my own critiques!) of alternative Web design is that it creates a barrier to entry for your visitors to actually engage with the site. If your site is meant to present the user with X but doesn't follow closely enough to format Y, then theoretically, there's a learning curve to even use the page. However, when you think of the UI for a game, X will be presented in format Y, Z, T, V, and often, even little kids will still figure them out! Growing up, I had little issue figuring out the quick-select in Ratchet & Clank, or how the many different formats of skill trees work, or the ways a player's inventory will work, or where your player piece goes when you move in a wacky-looking board game like Candyland. The inconvenience, in a grand majority of instances, was overcome by the fun!   

The critique of user experience is definitely something I've put some thought into! I even wrote it up in a blog post I was writing last year 

Since then though, this is one of the ideas that I've found challenges for, and that's why, after reading replies here, I was inspired to make the thread on webcraft inspiration from game UI! The idea that sites have to look the same in order to be functional for their users is almost directly challenged by games (including those made for kids or with accessibility in mind) displaying so much creative motion and yet remaining functional for their users. Free-floating images, styles & flair, movement, format & shape, often even elements that serve the same basic function, like skill trees (or business functions like cash shops    ), can look radically different from game to game! It's possible, or even probable, that the lowest common denominator of user is more capable of figuring things out than they've been given credit for by current standards of Web UI/UX. Of course, a business wants it to be navigable, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it has to be such a stickler for the apparent rules of business pages just so a user can navigate it.

Web design may have tricked itself into thinking that the standard bar for Web design is currently well-aligned with this principle of minimal convenience. I suspect that it's gone well beyond the level of convenience that makes a site functional for users, and game UI is a smoking gun for that suspicion   

Like Melon, I agree that the colors are gone because a more plain site is less costly to maintain & update. I also think it's possible that it doesn't have to be that way, though it's a bit of a shot in the dark. There are several columns keeping the trends of corporate & corporate-inspired Web design up, including the tools/libraries used to make websites, the learning methods required to bring people into more creative webcraft, and the inspirations that are visible to people. They're all sort of big topics on their own, but they're potentially homegrown ways that creativity on the Web can be nudged into not only a more maintainable state but also a state that's closer to the people.

Cash chops in games are often made with the colors intact partly because the people have the tools, the learning resources, the creative inspirations, and other investments like infrastructure & digital assets. A game company doesn't have to give them that, and yet, it's there. There's probably something deeper going on, too, but I'm sort of just on the outside looking in & seeing this happening