Does Myspace.com Keep a Designer on Staff?

Do they? Does anybody know? It sure doesn’t seem like it. I signed up for Myspace.com in 2004, and the profile pages looked like they were designed by programmers… They were horrible. I’m not just talking about the “look” either: designers aren’t just paid to give something a “look,” they’re paid to make it clear and organized. Many times, programmers know how to organize code, but they don’t know how to organize something for the user. In other words, they can organize for themselves, but they can’t organize for others.

So, in 2004 I signed up on Myspace.com and the design of the site was just some hastily made background-colors and 1px borders that were spat onto the programming…

Between 2004 and September of 2007 Myspace.com went through what I like to call the “Sprinkling of Web 2.0 Graphics” phase, where every now and then I would log in and some gnarly old icon would’ve been updated to look a bit like Web 2.0 style sites.

Then, in September, 2007, Myspace.com made its first major upgrade of the default profile view (the user’s profile view, not the public one). Here is my Myspace profile, in “classic” and “new” schemes:

Both of these are shown “above the fold” in a standard 1024 x 768 monitor. As you can see, this is a slight improvement, but it still isn’t very good. There is nothing here that makes us want to look at the page. In fact, if it were any other web page, nobody would bother to look. Thankfully for Myspace.com, the popularity of the site (given its features and timely arrival on the scene) have made up for its lack of aesthetics, and it continues being one of the most popular places on the Internet.

Additionally, I should point out that I understand why Myspace’s design is so bad. It probably came about from the meteoric and unexpected growth of the site, which created a head-pounding “ASAP Environment” where everything (and we’re talking about thousands of everythings) had to be done NOW. Myspace has been so successful that, at least 4 years into the project, they’ve just been able to catch their breath enough to do a minimal upgrade to the layout.

However, this doesn’t excuse the new addition of a huge banner advertisement in Myspace’s header. I can’t believe they’ve done this: Putting an ad in your header, which is often the main presence of your company’s branding on a website, is unabashedly, inexcusibly tacky. After all, who owns this site? Myspace, or one of those annoying ring-tone providers?