Designing For the MySpace Crowd
Since August of this year I’ve been doing work for Martyr Agency, a Miami based booking and promotions agency. My duties have involved everything from banner design to poster production. Amongst all this Photoshop work I’ve also taken it upon myself to brush up their MySpace page a bit, at least until we have a working website in order.
During this time I’ve learned one thing, MySpace, as the fabulous Mike Davidson has already told us, is the most unusable heap of garbage the world has produced, at least from an accessibility and design standpoint. And working with the design of a Music MySpace account makes things even harder.
Earlier this year Mike D wrote up an article appropriately titled Hacking A More Tasteful MySpace, appropriate because to create a perfectly accessible MySpace you have to do just that, hack apart every bit of code ever found on that dreaded site. Accompanying this article was an amazing template that anyone could modify and use on their own account. Unfortunately this layout doesn’t work with Music Accounts, so it’s been up to me to create a layout for the MA profile.
While I’ve yet to create a custom layout for the profile I have been working with a simple design that had been used before I ever came into the scene. I spent well over an hour today tidying up the horrible CSS and converting basic HTML to hopefully standards compliant xHTML. I’ve stripped out the old page break tags and replaced them all with paragraph and headline formatting so the W3C validator actually has some kind of outline to go by.
If there’s one bit of advice I can give to everyone out there it’s temporarily forget everything you’ve learned about standards and good design practices. The MySpace crowd doesn’t care about standards based coding, and what’s good and sensible in graphic design has no application in their community. Where we’re accustomed to shine, gloss, and Web 2.0 colors, they like grungy background, dark colors, and annoying Flash.
Be careful, MySpace is a strange creature with a bite way worse than it’s bark.
Categorized as Design, Media
My Space
I am so jealous, I absolutely love your layout, I’ve sent you a friend request (the words friend request sound so awkward on a blog about proper design, especially in the comments)
The MartyrAgency.com domain is still available.. Better quit screwing around with this bloated mess at myspace and help these people called MartyrAgency get a real profile on the web..
I just rebuilt my profile on top of the old one because I couldn’t be bothered playing about with the code too much. I managed to come up with http://myspace.com/mikekuul (design mirrors the design I am working on for my personal site) which looks fine. Like you said, people on myspace don’t care if it is valid, as long as it looks trendy to them.
Then again, I am going to hell for bad mark-up :(
Heh, cheers Kevin.
http://myspace.com/the1movement
I just recently went through a long process on creating a div overlay layout for MySpace for a new Restaurant that is opening up in my town. It was quite the pain in the arse, its not perfect but it came out pretty sweet! Just that the only thing that is not-manual are the comments, everything else has to be done by hand (ie the Friends, Upcoming Events, etc.)
http://myspace.com/riverfallscomplex
Hi i just went over my profile inspired by
http://www.myspace.com/secretshows
but when i saw the source of secretshows i asked myspace to get a css 2.0 like they have but didnt get an answer.
my profile
http://www.myspace.com/mckdesign
Okay, so how DID you do it with a music account? would you mind sharing your secrets?? ;)
Hi, one thing i noticed is that with a screen reader most of myspace just is flat out unusable, I did a few things on my page so i can use it with jaws for windows. I switched my page to classic view then in jaws i turn off frame start and end, lots of crap hiddin after that, then i also shut off inline frames, this has helped sorta but the quagmire of absolute disreguard for the blind of course remains. I have contacted myspace on this several times and gotten no where. We won’t even go in to the instant messenger client they threw up with no love for the blind, yes i know that i go on about blind people, but that is the disability i have the most experience with since i am blind myself