gereon's blog

Imagining Layouts and Interface

My sentence is "judging for Das Ungemütliche in the interface" and I feel like there are two directions I can define "Das Ungemütliche" for me.

First, there is the idea that "Das Ungemütliche", the uncozyness/uncomfortable, is interface design and interaction language that is corporate. Design that is made to not be necessarily interesting or anywhere close to challenging but instead to be very clean, "for everyone". No edges, no personality. Cozyness to me is a bit messy, stuff is lying around, it is very personal. As soon as that is gone, cleaned out, it becomes very "Ungemütlich" to me. Too clean. Too empty. Dead husks of self-serving information zombies.

Secondly, there is the visual noise. I like noise! But there is something to say about how hard it is to read the internet without an adblocker. The amount of blinking and moving textures and things telling you to click them can be very overwhelming. That's very "Ungemütlich", hat deluge of visuality, each with their own colours and animations.