(–)mpotence of Articulate Structure

I’m in a great mood today. Last nights drink with the fishes meet up was a hit and I’ve spent the morning working on bloody photographs, literally. What could be better.

So, what does this have to do with the impotence of articulate structure? Nothing. I digress.

Impotence of Articulate Structure really

I’ve been doing a lot of work with information architecture and Page layout design considerations for a few web applications I’ve been working on. In doing my usual research, I remembered this article Cameron Moll wrote in 2003, entitled “Good Designers Copy Great Designers Steal“. So I started thinking about how designers have applied this kind of appropriation, with regards to information architecture.

Cited in a subsequent blog on the topic, Cameron illustrated the appropriation of design elements from outside sources, for a refined layout. In fact, I’ve found this to be a useful tool when designing. I’ve done this very thing with repeatPenguin, actually adopting an element from Cameron Moll’s Authentic Boredom for the design.

The Structure Thief

It didn’t take long to realize this topic is a little like beating a dead horse. Every so often, as anyone who pays attention to the web knows, a whole slew of new sites come along, each mimicking the other.

For a little fun, lets take a look at a few. I’ll start where I always do, with a question. What sites have I been most frequenting? At the top of my list, this time, was LinkedIn.

I know, 3 years too late, but I finally got around to creating an actual profile, mostly out of curiosity. A MySpace for professionals? Could it work? In any case, I started to notice how nicely the site was designed, in terms of how the content is organized. It’s clean, easy to read, easy to navigate.

Success! Of course, at the same time, the site had a striking similarity to a site I still find particularly unuser friendly, Amazon.com

Amazon has always been problematic in handling the amount of content they database. I’m not sure if their latest redesign came about before or after Linked in came onto the scene in 2003, but I believe the effort to contend with huge amounts of content was sincere.

This leads me to the next evolution along this trend, Flickr. Flickr is perhaps the most intuitive site around. They have adopted some of the same architectural features as Linked In and Amazon and they have managed to overcome the obstacles restraining Amazon, by keeping their navigation simple and relying on search engine over click-through.

If all this is true, then what is to be said for the architecture thief? Is this the best approach? Certainly, a little research never hurt anyone. Benefiting from someone else’s successes and failures is essential in web design, as it is in just about any field. The question is, when does this become interesting? And when does the thief become the thieved?