The Beauty of Illegibility
Modern web design is highly oriented towards making the digital environment maximally legible. Designers want a site to be easy to use. They want users to be able to navigate to their destination in the minimum number of clicks. The designer wants the discovery of new destinations to require as little effort as possible, relying on algorithmic suggestions in order to (quite effectively) direct the user towards content the user will enjoy. These are all things that seem like obviously good goals for a designer, and they grew out of an era where websites were often cluttered and confusing. A time when the lack of consistent interface idioms left new users unable to navigate around a site or piece of software. However, this change does not come without costs.
In Seeing Like a State, the redesign of Paris’s streets is explored. The book notes that one major factor in the move to a more grid based design was the desire to increase legibility. A local of the city could move around easily, but if a new person came to a neighborhood they would find themselves lost without directions. The redesign to avoid this may have been for political reasons (making it easier for the army to crack down on dissidents), but it also was basically correct in observing that organic and illegible streets make the city harder for non-locals to navigate, and that it’s possible to clear away that illegibility. The attitude of a legibility focused web designer can be seen through the same lens. Just like with cities though, this “modernization” is a tradeoff.
Generally speaking, the cities that people today find most beautiful are those that retain that old illegibility. There’s something intimate about wandering a narrow winding street, or hearing the chatter from a restaurant tucked away in an alley. These are places that demand not to simply be seen, but to be explored. Through that exploration, the places we discover are given additional weight. Everyone who’s lived in a city for a while has a few spots in their city that they grow some connection to. A feeling that this restaurant or that park is a little secret, a secret shared when inviting a friend to experience the little joys of that place with you. There is something delightfully alive that is unique to a landscape one must wander through, to a place that reveals its secrets only through time. This is the beauty of illegibility, the joy of adventure and exploration. It is a beauty we should seek to recapture and to cultivate in our physical environment, a piece of the puzzle that we must balance against always seeking only greater convenience. We can pursue this in our physical landscape, how we lay out our streets and design out buildings, but also in our digital landscape.
When you go back and look at archives of the 2000s era internet, there is something charming about it. Even with all of the things that today we would quickly decry as “bad design”, there is something to the chaos and color and irreverence that’s appealing. It’s the neon cacophony of old Times Square or Hong Kong:
Part of what makes this era of the internet so charming is the inherent celebration of individuality and artistic expression, each website is a person’s opportunity to show off and express themselves. But it goes beyond that. A piece of what makes these old sites fun is the inherent illegibility that pervades that early internet. Without decent search engines or social media, discovery of new websites is largely through direct recommendations on forums, or a friend messaging you about this cool site they just found. This illegibility adds a sense of adventure to the experience of using the internet, and a sense of place to each individual site. As the years pass, we have entered an era where the web is hyper-legible, and where the chaos of the individual is constrained by the centralized platforms we all rely on. I am not the first to note the “bootstrap-ening” of the web, and I’m sure I won’t be the last. What I am trying to get at is that this change is more fundamental than a change in aesthetic sensibilities, or even an overall constraining of aesthetic freedom.
The fundamental change is in the reformation of the internet into a place that sacrifices uniqueness and community scale in order to maximize the degree of ease with which a new person can discover and navigate across and within websites. This change is probably a good thing for places like Wikipedia and Amazon, public spaces that serve a narrow purpose. It’s good for them to be easily accessible to everyone! However, as more and more people spend more and more time online, we should consider whether we want not just our online stores, but our online neighborhoods and homes to also fall into this same pattern of being regularized and indexed.
There are small hints that we are naturally discovering this lack of obfuscation in our current platforms. gather.town throws simplicity away to form an online space that gives a greater feeling of place and transience. Discord’s primary server mode is invite-only, with most servers sacrificing their “reach” in exchange for closer and more trusting communities. People are coming around to the idea that having all of your online experiences take place within logged, indexed, and constrained spaces isn’t always great. I think we’ll continue to see this trend, with more and more online activity moving back into spaces that are obfuscated. Some will be private, some will be public, but they will have in common the reduction in how much of their content landscape can be seen “from above”, and how much of it must be discovered by exploring the alleyways.
I’m not calling for everyone who posts online to learn HTML and make their own websites instead of just using Twitter or whatever, though I do think many might enjoy it if they give it a shot. Instead, I’m just saying that as designers and as users, we should embrace a world that is not always legible. We should understand that sometimes adventure and uniqueness is just as important as ease-of-use. Let’s take our time, and explore the alleyways.
