Sickdesigner

It’s not often that we get to experience real, intense emotion when we look at a website. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever experienced it. Until today. Through a very friendly exchange of @ tweets with Jin Yang (he does “designery stuff at Stack Exchange”) he linked me to one of his blog posts (late October, 2008) and then, like a stack of bricks (<- see what I did there) I was hit by an actual emotion. I immediately felt calm, relaxed, almost hypnotized by this simple blog post about some feature of WordPress.
You’re probably reading this thinking “Sick, you’re just a sick, emotionless robot, aren’t you?“. The funky thing is I’m not. Which made the experience even more mind boggling.
I then quickly tweeted back to Jin, telling him about my experience. To which he responded “i think this page is more “zen” imo http://bit.ly/lNdil3“. If you go to that page, and I urge you to do so, you’ll, indeed, find quite a “Zen” looking piece of art direction. Very nice, but nowhere near as emotional as the first post.

I then realized I had been listening to Craig Armstrong. For those of you who didn’t care to click his name and read about the guy, he’s a pianist and composer of very calming, relaxing instrumental music. Ok, so Mr. Armstrong surely had some sort of effect on my experience here, no? As it turns out, he didn’t.

The test

I tried looking at the same page several hours later, while listening to Megadeth. And while the audio was by no means similar to the soothing piano licks of Armstrong, my experience was, nevertheless, the same. The same peaceful, serene feelings were there, unhindered by the heavy, aggressive riffing of Mustaine & Co.
Time to bring in the big guns. I used my work colleagues as guinea pigs, showing half of them the site with some music by Craig Armstrong and half without. Wouldn’t you know it, they had the same experience as I, regardless of the soundtrack. So there was no interference from the audio, just a fortunate happenstance.

There’s a very scientific explanation for why this, seemingly, simple page has such a powerful effect. And the answer, as with most things scientific, lies in our noggins. The visual part of the brain processes images in various ways, but they are almost never 100% reliable. In fact, we base many of our assumptions about what we see by making use of things we’ve known since we were children. As we were growing up, we, as all children, had an instinctive need to grab, drag, touch, push and pull pretty much anything we could get our fluffy little hands on. That’s because touching something is one of the most useful ways to prove that what our eyes see is real. But, wouldn’t you know it, the web is not 3D (thankfully) and so we’re easily fooled by parallax trickery and faux depth.

How does this relate to Jin’s page? Simple: the blurry, fuzzy background and its black foreground, coupled with the white, crisp text of the post itself give the, very natural, illusion of depth. But this isn’t enough. Whether consciously or not, Jin went a step further with it and added some very soft, 1px thick lines around the header. What they do is emphasize the idea that you’re behind something. Something that is not in focus, some space that is darkened by the looming sunset and it really does a wonderful job of making you feel like you’re looking through some sort of window or large crack in a wall. Moreover, take notice of the angle that the background was taken at. It’s a very steep angle, quite dramatic, which works to give it that theatrical sense that you are privy to something inspiring, something that will, surely, cause some sort of life changing breakthrough.
Instead it’s about WordPress Custom Fields.

Actually, the fact that it’s about something as dry and technical as Custom Fields is proof that our brains don’t need context in order to be emotionally stimulated. What we need are visual cues, hints, angles and directions that talk to our brains in a way that it understands. If the content itself were in the same vein as the design of the page, I’d probably start a cult and worship Jin. But I won’t. Instead, I’ll keep admiring this wonderful page, this beautifully emotional experience, hidden away amongst millions of dry and uninspiring pages and be thankful that I know of its existence and am able to share it with you.