Feng Shui for Web Designers

December 12, 2002 5:53 PM

Feng Shui for Web Designers Contains such helpful tidbits as "Macromedia Flash encourages curvy images and is therefore blessed with positive chi" and "The messy dithering of colours that occurs with JPEG compression is bad feng shui."
posted by oissubke (16 comments total)

Disclaimer: I disagree with a lot of the design advice presented. My sites tend to use lights of straight lines, and none of them have background music.
posted by oissubke at 5:54 PM on December 12, 2002

Ditto.

Good idea, bad theories.

Oh well, this could have been a lot better if someone who really knew what they were talking about wrote it :)
posted by manero at 5:56 PM on December 12, 2002

Damn, I've been using that joke for years. All of my designs are instinctively made with Feng Shui. This site could be executed to more ridiculous proportions though, like Feng Shui Cosmetics. Why, internet memes abound! Why not Feng Shui Legos? Or the ultimate guide to Feng Shui in the Sims?

Hmm.... you know what, Dibs.
posted by Stan Chin at 6:03 PM on December 12, 2002

So break up the straight lines and add unusual and curvy design elements wherever you can. The vector-based design platform of Macromedia Flash encourages curvy images and is therefore blessed with positive ch'i.

Hmm. I have heard flash called many things, and blessed sure ain't one of 'em.
posted by lazaruslong at 6:14 PM on December 12, 2002

Fengshui for websites? What's next, Qi tags in html? Websites have nothing to do with fengshui or your qi (although internet porn will probably take its toll), and this guy's misinterpretation of fengshui sounds like a usability nightmare. I may not know much about website design, but it must be more than this guy knows about fengshui.
posted by Poagao at 6:24 PM on December 12, 2002

By David Gauntlett, September 1999...

nice feng shui :)

although i could do without all the curvy lines even back then.

I have heard flash called many things, and blessed sure ain't one of 'em.

I must've been hanging around the wrong design circles then. do we need to go over the whole 'tool vs. toolman' thing again? jeez. ;)
posted by poopy at 6:30 PM on December 12, 2002

poopy: Admittedly, I am biased against flash. I have been exposed to far too many spinning-in-my-face-blaring-Foreigner-greatest-hits-animations to think as flash as anything except annoying. I like the simple approach, and i just don't like flash.

but hey, I don't make sites, so i can't really judge. just a pref.
posted by lazaruslong at 7:11 PM on December 12, 2002

Let me just state for the record that I know nothing about website design, but I know that idiotic cartoon snails at the top of the page rank pretty low in the "harmony" department for me. Just simple bad taste, in my book.
posted by readymade at 7:31 PM on December 12, 2002

I have been exposed to far too many spinning-in-my-face-blaring-Foreigner-greatest-hits-animations to think as flash as anything except annoying.

oh, i agree completely, i can't stand those self-inducing-epileptic-seizure bastards (and ironically i've been summoned to provide one of those silly-ass flash intros for a client once again. yeah, my job sucks). but the product itself (especially mx) has proven to be something valuable, not necessarily 'blessed', but most definitely valuable.
posted by poopy at 8:00 PM on December 12, 2002

When I was running a web development team in Thailand, we were contracted to produce the website for a large telecoms company. All designs had been approved, coding was underway when we got the call:

Client: "We would like to move the logo."
Me: "Why?"
Client: "Our Feng Shui consultant advises us to."

I was torn between cultural sensitivity (misplaced perhaps) and a designers instinctual reaction that the client should never ever dictate design decisions.

For the next several weeks, dragging into months, we fought an endless battle of the wills. Blues devolved into oranges, left and right aligned images were swapped back and forth. At one point a wheat field sprouted and the client asked for an animated chicken (refused). I was well beyond despair.

I found out later from my offline colleagues that the company in question had all brochures, print ads, tvc's, and now online work, reviewed and approved by a committee of feng shui experts.

Unfortunately, even the "recommendations" from the committee were changed and rescinded with no apparent reason. I suspect that the client found out that when they played their feng shui card, there was less resistance to their requests on our part.

Having since learned much more about feng shui, client management, and how to push my designs through, I see many other ways in which that situation could have been handled. But at least I can claim to have developed a site with standards-compliant feng shui.
posted by i blame your mother at 11:23 PM on December 12, 2002

What is the appeal of this Feng Shui thing? It strikes me as being a kind of astrology of shopping for home furnishings, but looking at how popular it seems to be in the US, I wonder if there isn't something more to it. Is Feng Shui just another one of those fake Eastern religious fads for deeply materialistic people who want to think of themselves as "spiritual"?

Can someone explain?
posted by fuzz at 12:53 AM on December 13, 2002

Most of what I know about Feng Shui (literally "wind water", but colloquially means something closer to "harmony") comes from how my mother and my grandmother wouldn't let me let me arrange my bedroom as a kid, and is probably mixed in with other random Chinese superstitions.

That said, "astrology of shopping for home furnishings" and then placing them in certain ways sounds about right.

The idea is that each direction has a predominant mood or energy, and that's associated with one of the five elements (earth, water, fire, wood, and metal), and a color (and maybe a number?). You arrange stuff around a room and around a house to balance the energy (chi) and encourage the flow of energy. When the energy is balanced and flowing, your life is supposed to be better.

For example, south is associated with red and fire. Having your kitchen stove against the south wall with red decor then would be considered a fire hazard. Northeast is supposed to be good for studying, and sleeping with your head pointing north is the "death position". Or something like that.

Some of Feng Shui's most basic ideas are sensible (natural light = good, clutter and dirt = bad), but for me, the rest of it is pretty much an exercise in attempting a bit of cultural understanding.

And Stan Chin, Feng Shui in the Sims would rock.
posted by ligeia at 2:42 AM on December 13, 2002

It says a lot that the page is now three years old. Three years ago the backlash against nasty flash animations was must less noticable.

Well... it was outside my office. ;)
posted by twine42 at 3:13 AM on December 13, 2002

But at least I can claim to have developed a site with standards-compliant feng shui.

Now THAT's fuuuuunny. Maybe several of us MeFi'ers ought to put together a formal Feng Shui Language for submission to the W3C? (Be easy to script in XML). Flash would no longer be necessary ... one could just apply the <makeitcurvy> tag.
posted by MidasMulligan at 7:30 AM on December 13, 2002

I tried connecting, and I got this message:
The web site Feng Shui for Web Designers is unaccessible. Please move your keyboard 9 inches to the northeast, and add a water feature.
posted by CrunchyFrog at 8:15 AM on December 13, 2002

As far as I've heard, gifs dither, jpgs get artifacting.
posted by folktrash at 3:49 PM on December 13, 2002