| Friday, August 15, 2008 |
11:53 - Here's to 1994
http://disneyanimation.com/
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Gruber links to this: Walt Disney Animation Studios' new site. It's like a throwback to the old days of web design, and I mean that in the best possible way.
I mean, just look at it. It's like something you could code up in two hours in Pico. View the source—there's only a couple of screens of code, and it's such raw code too. Like from the days before there was CSS and JavaScript APIs and embedded analytics. The whole thing is table-driven, for crying-out-loud—and there's hardly a CSS element ID to be seen. Indeed, hilariously, the only two IDs I see are on two different tables, and they both have the same ID. There's only the barest minimum of JavaScript (looks like it's for image-swapping, which probably could have been done more elegantly and Web 2.0-ily in AJAX or something), and even the stylesheet file is only a few screens long. The page doesn't even have a doctype. It's nice clean code, with proper XHTML markup conventions and all, and there are a couple of nods to AJAX in some of the sub-pages (e.g. the FAQ), but it looks like it was done by someone who hails from the time when a website with an awesome design was something you just threw together in an afternoon's inspiration.
Compare, for example, to the main Disney site. It's like the diametric opposite. Way too clever for its own good, probably the result of thousands of man-hours and dozens of usability and focus-group meetings, chock-full of video and dynamic content and things that jump around and go boo at you—and it's far less enjoyable, even though it offers to make itself your home page. Heh. As if.
True, they're intended for very different purposes. But in the case of the Animation department's site, it's like they thought the best way to get back to where the studio was in the high-flying mid-90s was to redo their website the way it was done back then, back when everything was still new and fresh and exciting and we didn't have time to do things thoroughly and according to spec simply because there was still so much to create.
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Brian Tiemann
