Thursday, March 5, 2009

Make Every Site a Sight for Sore Eyes

Have you noticed that the Web is getting a little too busy? If it's not a pop-up ad, it's a strip of contextual Google ads or an animated banner ad or one of the most annoying ads on the Internet with the talking smiley faces or the "Congratulations! You've already won!" announcer. Who in their right mind would ever create a Web advertisement with audio that you can't turn off? We're all doing our best to ignore the ads as it is. Don't give us extra reasons to hate your product.

But these problems are a thing of the past. Now you can read the content you want to read without any of the visual clutter you couldn't care less about. Readability is an experimental service provided by the arc90 design firm. Through the use of a Bookmark (in Firefox) or a Favorite (in Internet Explorer), you can instantly transform any Web page into a comfortable reading experience. No ads, no images, no banners--just the text of an article or blog post.

Readability allows you to customize the style, font and margin width of the stripped-down page to ensure maximum viewing pleasure. Now that I think about it, this could serve as a fairly nice printer-friendly page, especially if you want to print something out in a larger typeface for your offline relatives.

Watch the video below for full details. Obviously my site is so well-designed and engaging that it probably wouldn't be a good page to experiment with, but I guess you could give it a try... ;-)

2 comments:

ericaislands said...

Oh people are going to hate this! I love it!

Anna Weaver Lopiccolo said...

Have you seen Print What You Like? You can delete ads and anything else you don't want on a webpage before printing.

Google