After reading an article by Hebdige on Subculture and Style, today, I tried to go into the cultures and subcultures that exist within the frame of Interaction Design. I was surprised how the thing that first sprang up was the culture of Web Design. And inside the culture of Web Design, we had (or still have) the subculture of Flash Websites.
When I dug more into this topic I found that it is really interesting to analyze from the days of the flashy banners (one subculture) , to the days of Web 2.0 (another subculture)
Initially the websites were full with texts, monotonous and boring content. In order to break away from this monotonicity, it was followed by the usage of lots of pictures and providing more and more links in order to make it more interactive for the user.
However in the gamut of links available for the user who often got confused, the notion of using flashing texts, and blinking images were introduced. This led to a surge in the number of websites trying to do it. And yes, what better way to gather attention then have a extremely harsh color like pink, orange, bright greens on a black background. Visual ergonomics took a back seat. It was all about garnering attention. Anything that helped in doing so, was in fashion. So many sites had extra borderings around content, in bright colors to lay emphasis. Clip arts were used to add to the texts to make it look more stylish. I am sure one can look at the prime background colors of the websites during this period and see that it was black.
This was similar to the punk subculture where the appearance itself was enough to get attention. Since what was accepted in the . . . → Read More: A Flashy Subculture
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