4D Web Design
Four years ago – before I turned Distantly Yours into a graphic design studio – I had the idea of making a “4-dimensional website.” Normally, websites work with two-dimensions: users move a mouse on X and Y axes to arrive at a hyperlink or button, in order to go from one web page to the other.
Now, there have been some experiments with 3D web design, but virtually all of them suck. Reading a page is a 2-dimensional activity, and if you cut out reading in favor of making a 3D website, there really aren’t many ways to encourage repeat visits – unless you have an entire video game studio, and the money to pay them all.
That said, the idea I had of a 4-dimensional website still presents 2-dimensional content, but it incorporates time as major element of the website. It was an idea I thought no one else would ever have. Then, several years later, someone else did it. And that person was famous.
Enter the Heap
High-ranking web design crush Shaun Inman recently launched The Heap, a clever experiment billed as “time’s perpetual redesign.” It’s centered around the idea that the age of a post can be communicated visually. Inman employs two techniques to accomplish this: the accent color for the site changes throughout the year, fading from one hue to the next; and the site’s content eventually fades from a clearly legible gray-on-black to an unreadable white-on-off-white – fading away, like our memories.
From a design standpoint, there are a number of interesting ideas at work here. Inman worked to simplifies the site by communicating dates with colors, thus decreasing the reader’s dependency on datelines. But that’s not the only simplification Inman has implemented on his site. He’s also taken the plunge into sans-sidebar blog design, radically simplifying the site. Before, he had a blog headline and excerpt in the main content column, and then links of interest in the sidebar. Now, the links share the main content area with the blog – which makes sense, because he updates his links section more often than his blog, anyway.
Philosophical Implications
What’s interesting to me about The Heap is that it defies the normal function of a journal. Most of us tell ourselves we write a journal in order to remember something. But let’s not kid ourselves. How often do we actually read our old journals, and actually like what we find there? Everyone I know seems to think their old journals are an embarrassment, best left forgotten.
The Heap is one of the first journals designed around the principle that we don’t want to remember things we write in them. It’s as if our paradoxical attitude toward journals is so common, yet it took until now for someone to confess it, and call the rest of us on it in the process.
Weblog as Event
Granted, a public journal shares a secondary function: communication with others. But even then, there are philosophical implications. Let’s say a journal entry is like an event – a birthday party, a movie night, etc. It’s an experience in which a group of people may participate, and is fixed to a specific time. It’s natural to want to discourage others from participating in it long after the event’s conclusion is due.
For example, if your friends kept celebrating your 21st birthday four weeks after the fact – just so they could participate in the experience of your birthday – it would be creepy. Likewise, we don’t want others to participate in a blog post we wrote several months ago, because we’ve moved on. The Heap is a blog that moves on with us.
The Experiment That Never Was
Unfortunately, I never got around to making a 4-dimensional website, myself. The idea I had at the time was to make a site that used the fourth dimension – time – as another axis of the navigation scheme. A link could exist on a web page – at specific x and y coordinates – but the link also changed depending on which coordinate in time you were at.
The end result would effectively be a website that appears to be changing, evolving, constantly. The site would have certain moods at certain times of day. During the day, the colors would be light and airy. The content would focus on extroverted subjects like movies, design and food, for example.. But at night, the colors would go dark, the content would become more personal, and more introspective. And for each, there could be blog entries or photo posts that would expand and contract throughout each day. Then – perhaps – from 3am to 6am – the site would change into a mode where all content would accessible by one index.
Of course, it never happened. Yes, the idea was the experiment in interactive art that I was looking for, but it was too ambitious and – frankly – too melodramatic for where I wanted to take myself artistically.
Different Modes of 4D Design
I think the main difference between The Heap and the idea I had four years ago lies in applying the T-dimension – time – to different elements of the design. Whereas I wanted to use time as a dimension in the navigation system, The Heap uses time to assist in communication. The two are worlds apart.
It leaves me to wonder: if navigation and communication are two different tasks a website must accomplish, what other things can we try applying time to?