10.29.07

Why do all Ruby sites look alike?

Posted in Uncategorized at 11:10 pm by David Kellogg

Terry Chay has a running joke if he does not remember an Asian girl’s name, he just admits he’s a banana, and that to him, all Asians look alike. I think if you are a Ruby developer you can tell these sites apart but really, why do all Ruby sites look alike?

The Rails sites here appear to be templates for many other ugly sites. I will start with the worst, then I will get to the RoRing Rules.

Ruby sites gone not-so-wild

Big Patents has Big Text. Not surprisingly, they use CamelCaps. The site brags about some wonderful patent graph. Why don’t they show it instead of huge text?

This breaks every rule of good style. It is the anti-site. So ugly, it is almost charming. It follows the first RoR Rule, Big.

1. Big text
2. Colors that hurt
3. Grids rule!
4. White space overdone

Jobster. Find your dream job. It has many large words. Jobster uses colors that hurt. This image does not do it justice. Click on the link and visit the eye pain.

LoanBack is a boring grid.
Perfect grid. Mechanical grid. I would love to look at eye tracking data for this. I have to read really hard and concentrate to see what the site is about. If I reached this through Stumble Upon, I would skip it, since I give most web sites 3 seconds before I try to leave.

This is another colors-that-hurt site, Economy in Crisis. Red white and blue never looked so bad. I like the stats on the left, though.

Now for something completely different. Some sites take time to boil their message down to a few meaningful words and graphics. They make the point right away. They are not, of course, written in Rails.

LinkedIn promotes professional and college connections.

In some ways I dislike the page, but it gets the job done with a non-grid triangle. The eye is drawn to singing up.

Facebook is about your social connections. Notice the blue, blue, blue, blue, green signup. It also gets the job done. It is also a non-RoR site.

If you look at enough Ruby on Rails sites, they begin to look alike. There is no reason for the large text or gaudy colors, yet they proliferate. I begin to wonder if the framework that is Rails removes all hope for a creatively refreshing and different looking site.

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