AntiDull.com: The Good, the Bad and the Interesting

I was recently asked for permission to use one of my photos in AntiDull Online Art Magazine (www.antidull.com). It’s an intriguing concept so I agreed to give it a whirl and the photo they chose (shown at right) has just appeared in their second issue. Having had some time to look at it and to get comments from people I know, I’m ready to offer some thoughts on the end product.

I teach web design and multimedia at Youngstown State University and one of my first lessons is called “The Yin and Yang of Web Design”, which describes the dichotomy between the artistic part of designing an appealing web page and the technical aspect of writing valid, functional code. But there is a third side to web design called usability: Making web pages and applications that are easy and convenient for real people to navigate and use. A good synonym for “usability” in regards to web design is “effectiveness”, because how usable your site is is the single greatest determinant of how effective it will be at achieving your, or your business’, goals.

Usability is the most important thing to get right and for many people it’s the most difficult. Technical correctness isn’t hard (provided you care enough to try!) and many ugly sites are successful if they provide products or services that people want — as long as visitors can successfully use the site.

The Good part of AntiDull “magazine” is aesthetics: It’s an uncluttered and attractive design, obviously the work of people who know and care a lot about graphic design and art. It also must be said that a lot of the featured art work is stunning. I’m flattered to be included with the other artists in AntiDull.

The Bad list is a bit longer. First of all, it’s Adobe Flash based, which is a usability problem in itself (as well as being a major liability as far as search engine indexing is concerned). Secondly, the user interface is non-standard. The thumbnails that launch the Flash window don’t look like clickable links, there’s no text to indicate they are and they don’t even make the cursor change on mouse-over, like normal links.

The Flash content itself is also sub-optimal for usability. Yes, it’s clever, clicking or dragging on a corner of the screen to make a page “turn”, and the visual execution of the effect is well done, but it’s non-intuitive in the context of a web application. We should be past the stone age of web design when people thought they needed to make an on-line experience mimic that of a physical product. Sadly, that doesn’t seem to be the case here. The page-turning sound effect that accompanies each change is cringe-inducing kitsch and there’s no way to turn it off. The fact that navigation is strictly linear — you can only go to the next page or the previous one — is a rookie mistake in multimedia design: They need a “home” page with clickable thumbnails (or text) and the other pages of the magazine should have a link that returns you to home with one click.

An odd liability of AntiDull magazine is the poor readability of the text. The vector-based text of Flash ought to be exemplary in this regard. It looks as if all the text was done in Photoshop, converted into bitmap form and then downsized before inclusion in the Flash content. And though they show each featured photographer’s web URL, it’s not a clickable link. You can’t even highlight and copy the URLs to paste into a web browser! There’s a major oversight.

But the biggest problem is probably the simplest: Size. If your subject matter is visual art, you need to present it large enough for your audience to view it well. Each photo in AntiDull is approximately 350 pixels square. That’s tiny in this age when 20-inch, 1200×1600 monitors are standard equipment on budget computers! The reason for this minuscule image size may be the overhead associated with Adobe Flash, but that’s really just another of the many reasons for doing away with Flash for a site like this: It limits browser compatibility, usability, image quality (size) and search engine friendliness… and all it provides in return is cool animation between pages. The detrimental effect of Flash on search engine indexing is ironic because the publishers of AntiDull most likely found my photography through a Google search — where my web site has a good page rank precisely because I avoid the use of JavaScript, Flash, etc.

Finally, after covering the Good and the Bad, we come to the Interesting. At first I thought I was going to list this with the Bad, but after some browsing I decided I really quite like it. It’s the decision to present the photographs in square format, a way that very few photographers shoot now. Mostly we stick to the 2:3 aspect ratio of 35mm cameras, the 3:4 or 6:7 ratios of medium format gear (most point-and-shoot cameras also use the 3:4 format) or the 4:5 of most large-format cameras. This means that, unless the photographer supplied the image in square format (Hasselblad shooters or those who’ve cropped the photos themselves), most of the photos must have been quite severely cropped to fit. I was surprised to see my image cropped square, but I like the result. Assuming that most of the other photographers’ work was also cropped by the publishers, they did a wonderful job. You can tell the people who put this project together are graphic designers with a good eye for composition.

To sum up: AntiDull magazine is a great idea with excellent content and a flawed execution. As long as you have the Flash plug-in for your web browser (most people do; it’s like one of those bacteria that almost everyone has but makes only a few people sick), it’s well worth a look. As it is now, I can’t imagine many people making it a monthly “must-see”, but with larger image presentation and some interface improvement, it just might catch on.

ADDENDUM: The publishers of AntiDull say they’re hoping to start a print version of their magazine. This sounds like a great idea. They’re clearly more comfortable with print format than online presentation and though I’m not overly impressed with AntiDull.com (in its present form), I’d definitely subscribe to a print publication that features similar art.

ADDENDUM 2: Antidull.com appears to be defunct. The site hasn’t had an update since September 2008. The index page had a banner proclaiming “New Issue Coming Today! Stay Tuned” for most of, 2009. Then in October it changed to “New Issue Coming Soon! Stay Tuned” so someone’s at least changing the home page every year or so, but it still doesn’t look promising.

ADDENDUM 3: As of April 17, 2010 the site says: “New Issue Being Published within 24-72 hours!” There has still been no new issue since September 2008.

ADDENDUM 4: August 2010 and there’s still no new issue but the tag line has changed to “New Issue Coming Soon!”