Simplicity as anti-design
plentyoffish.com and the role of anti-marketing design
Robert Scoble’s microsoft blog offers an interesting theory about simple (or ugly) design — that an un-designed site is somehow more appealing and makes more money. Sites like MySpace, Google, CraigsList are notoriously simple in design and also incredibly popular. Perhaps there is something about slick, designer-ish websites that turns off the average user.
The comment trail on Scoble’s post is particularly interesting in its discussion of the differences between ugly, usable, simple, anti-corporate, etc.