The Good, The Bad, The Poorly Designed (Part III)

Sit Down, You're Rocking The Boat

Yale School of Art

I wanted to move on to positive. I'd had it in my rough outline of tasks that part three of this series would be a website that had really turned it around.

and then I saw this.

In 2010, webpagesthatsuck listed Yale School of Art as a contender to the top 10 worst sites of the year. I thought, surely they cannot possibly mean Yale, the collegiate holy grounds for such well known (respective to their fields) alumni as Eli Whitney, Paul Newman and Meryl Streep (to name a few). There must be another site operating under the name Yale Art with no relation to the school and simply hoping for misguided searchers to stumble upon their site as they searched for Yale University.

I am horrified to share that this site, Yale School of Art, does in fact belong to Yale University. Upon further investigation I also found that five years on, they still just don't get it.

Why I Hate It:

The page does not stop moving. It is, in fact, nauseating. The background image jerks and jolts as the background letters are jostled about - intentionally, it would appear - while the foreground image trickles like oil over the top of those jolting letters. It's almost as though you're attempting to read a sign while sitting in a row boat, in the middle of the ocean during a hurricane. Now, imagine the letters on that sign are flashing on and off, but not all the letters flash on when they should. All you can think is "please, make it stop".

Next we move on to the layout of the content. On the left side we see a (nearly) alphabetized list of options ranging from about the site, admissions, gallery, everything else and home.  They are listed in a simple, generic format with zero pizazz. I mean honestly, with the ridiculous background they chose to go with, you'd think they could have spent two minutes organizing the layout for the remainder of the site and at the very least attempting to color coordinate the various text boxes. On top of that, everything is on the left side of the page. On inspection, I expect this was deliberate so that the user could enjoy the background image (after the seizures died down).

All in all, it's unacceptable to me that a university (YALE UNIVERSITY!) would allow this type of poorly designed mess to be representing them as a school. Hopefully the notice that appears at the top of the page indicating they are currently seeking a new Dean means that change is coming.

Get it together, Yale.