c’mon – you know the answer to that! of course i would disagree: it’s little function, little form!

however, back in the day (pre-clones), that ugly beige box was immediately recognizable as a *IBM* pc. twasn’t no amiga, twasn’t no atari. (early macs were beige too IIRC). and it carried its own cachet.

why don’t you stick with my example of the UPS truck :)

that’s why korzybsky invented e-prime :)

++It’s got a chunky, clunky, brash, aliased look all over it. ++

but why does that means it’s poorly designed? if the designers have a mandate, and they achieve that mandate in spades, then i find it hard to say that their product is poorly or crudely designed.

++ I don’t think anyone would argue that ebay is beautiful, or that it has a polished design,++

the shareholders might.

again, your explanations just reinforce my opinion that the seminar and it’s audience we’re exploring the notion design in very narrow sense — that “good” design is that which is pleasing to the eye (of a particular group of people).

i’ll use UPS for illustration again. a few years back, they changed their logo. they “declunkified” and “polished” it. i’m sure most everyone would agree that it is less clunky and more polished. It was probably successfull in it’s greater mass appeal as it rode some trends (glossy look, incorporated a swoosh of sorts). However, to me, it was a slap in the face to their long-established branding, and on a personal aesthetic level, grotesque.

so, to me, to ask “gee why doesn’t ebay take that aliased logo and polish it” is to me asking “whydon’t they make peanut butter out of grapes”. but i extend that to the whole of the site. it is part of their brand identity. one doesn’t need to invoke classism to analyze it. and i submit that it is one more reason why the site’s design is perfectly fine. sometimes *aesthetics* is not the point of design.
(especially where business is concerned)

I’m saying (or rather the speakers were saying) that ebay is the equivalent of that beige PC box.

Of course – they know exactly what they’re doing and who they’re designing for – the masses, who might be scared off by refined design, which would probably convey expensiveness. That’s one possible reason anyway.

what i perceive is an sentiment that ebay is poorly designed

I don’t think anyone would argue that ebay is beautiful, or that it has a polished design, even though they have the resources to do so if they wanted to. Obviously it’s crudely designed on purpose. The point was to discuss the reasons why this is the case, and the consensus was that high-end design for a site like ebay would communicate the scent of something “not for the masses.”

it becomes a “my design aesthetic is better than your design aesthetic” argument.

Is it somehow off-limits to say that one thing is beautiful and another ugly, and another thing middlin’? We’re getting to the old relativity of aesthetics debate here, but I certainly reserve the right to say one painting / piece of music / web site is beautiful and another is not. In some areas, this will be hotly debated, but I think you’d have a hard time finding someone who didn’t agree that ebay is crudely designed, relative to what would be possible with their resources.

one must ask “is ebay crudely designed”.

This is what I, and I think almost anyone, would take as a given. I don’t think you have to ask that question. Of course aesthetics are ultimately subjective, but here it’s subjective at a point on the spectrum where it would be hard to find disagreement. It’s got a chunky, clunky, brash, aliased look all over it. It’s not the sort of site that’s going to win any design awards – it’s hard for me to see where this would be a controversial point. I think that both designers and non-designers alike would agree that ebay is no gem of design.

The question is not *whether* it’s crudely designed, it’s why.

before one can ask “why is ebay so crudely designed” one must ask “is ebay crudely designed”.

exactly. so why is it called crude, if that is exactly what is done (re: ebay)? with ebay’s resources, i think it’s safe to assume that they know exactly what they are doing and are not flying blind.

or am i missing a part where a focus group was done that argues against my point? were ebay designers there saying that execs wouldn’t let them do what needs to be done design-wise?

i’m trying to reconcile what i perceive is an sentiment that ebay is poorly designed (or is this not it? is it already implicit that crude does not equal poor?) with the notion that a corporation will design to its audience (and by extension, that revenue will decide whther the design goal is being met).

if the former is the case, then i would argue that ebay is well designed. if one is going to continue to argue that it is poorly designed, it becomes a “my design aesthetic is better than your design aesthetic” argument.

i guess it’s kind of like debating the aesthetics of a UPS truck to me.

I don’t see how it’s intellectual wankery. A designer has to ask questions like “Who is my audience, and what kind of look will pull them in / put them off?”

the audience was acknowledging that just asking the question about classism puts them on the elitist side of the fence, right?

Ummm… no? Where is this elitism business coming from? How to design to an audience is very relevant to designers.

going the extra step of delving into whether it’s classist just strikes me as absurd — intellectual wankery.

The point of the panel (and my notes on it) was to explore the very issues you’re raising, and how/whether they tie into class-ism. Your comments and mine are just summarizing some of the issues/questions under discussion. It wasn’t like there some kind of collective head-nodding “ebay should be redesigned.” It wasn’t like that at all. More of a “How peculiar that a site with so many resources would stick with such a crude design – why do you think that is?”

i still don’t understand what the point is. moreover, i think ebay probably has a design department that would take issue with the assessment that it is marginally designed. it comes back to arbitration of taste. you (and a particular seminar audience) don’t think the site is pretty. fine. why does it need to be pretty? and , does not being pretty necessarilly lead to the conclusion that it is marginally designed? my own answers to these two questions would be “it doesn’t” and “no”.

unix/header design aesthetic: WordPress CLI theme – it really works!

also, for the truly design sensitive, there are web services – use sherlock or a dashboard widget or go for the uber-tech aesthetic of http response headers in green courier on a black background as your design theme, and just do it from the terminal. there are also firefox extensions that will allow you to totallly customize a site (via css and web monkey scripts) and maintain the look for all similar pages in a given site.