Kanye West’s new ‘Yeezy Supply’ Website: The case for a more joyful web
Introductions
My interest in UX primarily stemmed from graphic design. And the interplay of type, color and images to make you “feel” something. I was watching Abstract on Netflix, when I came across Paula Scher. We were well into the age of the crisp and clean aesthetic by then, with template sites permeating every single corner of our internet. But what I saw in Scher’s work somehow spoke to me. I could sense an urgency, a sort of palpable tension, and a deliberate disregard for the rules. There was a sense of play in her work, like she was using this medium as a playground.
A pandemic of passable websites
Fast forward to me being well into a course on Interaction Design, learning about users and how to design effectively and how to make websites easy for people to use. I had also just read “Don’t make me think” by Steve Krug. Everything was interesting for sure, it was very user focused but everything was only about that — about how to make things snappy for them. What I had discovered in Paula Scher’s work in Graphic design was missing, although I didn’t realize it. Throughout the course, I could not even think of Websites with a sense of play in them. To give you an idea, Amazon’s website can be assumed to be a web designer’s darling, at least based on how many references exist to it. And it should be! One of the most efficient websites out there, but dare I say also one of the most boring? All the websites and apps I’ve seen in recent times are fine with just being “usable”, they are simply not looking to delight! There is no sense of “enjoyment” which you can blame on Bauhaus I suppose! All of this is why I literally went “Whoaaa” when I stumbled upon something while looking for some shoes. Yeah, shoes.
Kanye West, Designer
Everybody into sneakers knows the Yeezy collection — the brainchild of Kanye West, rapper, producer, presidential candidate, fashion designer, and now…UX designer!
Before we talk about the website itself, it’s very important to understand who Kanye West is as a designer. A great inspiration for me, because he is the only person at such a level of influence in Performing arts (My other consuming passion) who was also a design nerd. He collaborates with designers all the time to do all sorts of things, architecture, fashion, stages, album covers, and most famously, the Yeezy sneakers which are on par in level of influence with Nike’s Jordans. He has stated multiple times the goal of his Yeezy design studio (multidisciplinary) is to pick up where Steve Jobs left off, making the world around us more aesthetic. And any quick Google search can attest to him being one of the most provocative, most “out there” designers in the world right now.
Mission Statement
Kanye’s agenda was to make websites feel more alive and human, and he was “tired of all the boxes”. So this literally translated to a constraint that there should be no boxes or lines of any kind on the website. Nothing should move in a straight way, from one side to another was another instruction.
What should be noted here is the very unique perspective of somebody who has a strong design sense making a website without probably learning anything about the field of UX in the form of books or courses. (And most importantly, someone not looking for a UX job!)
A clear sense of wanting to break all the rules was here from the beginning, the most potent of his ideas being that the models for his websites should all be working people who contribute to society in some way, and clicking on them will let you know who they are and what they do — removing them of the “nameless faces and bodies” tag.
Another thing you’ll notice is everything is in some ultra realistic 3D, shoes spinning in front of you, and clothes literally flying at you! (a leap away from all the 2D minimal design that has dominated the last few trend cycles)
You can “scroll” through a rack of clothes which spin. The entire website feels like a playground, something that would definitely delight me and create an unforgettable shopping experience online. Which should be one of the benchmarks of UX in my opinion. To create a great “experience” for the users, not just in terms of conserving them time, but something that will keep them on the website just because of how joyful it is to use.
A pandemic of seriousness
As we grow up, there is a sense of seriousness that accompanies everything we do which really inhibits a lot of professions. Interaction Design is one of those professions that should seek to break the rules to find new ways for people to play.
One of my favorite things to do is check out weird websites that exist for no particular reason. Like this, for example, which is a website that will self-destruct if it doesn’t get a message sent to it every day! There are so many of these that exist for no other reason than to exist! (Will write another article about these) Here is another that emulates Windows 98 on your browser. Joy is an intangible thing that some of these websites give us. The internet is a language of its own, separate from video and pictures and music and these websites remind us of how much fun we can have on it as a platform! While doing whatever it is we wanted to. Or maybe even discover something you never knew you needed before this. Interactions literally go beyond watching, hearing or anything else, yet it has the least amount of diversity in design.
Website Runways
We need more of these kinds of brands and people who design as art, mainly to show us the limits of what is possible with the web! This is why Fashion shows exist. You don’t see any of those dandy non-clothes anywhere else but on the runway — where its main objective is to push the boundary of what is possible with this art form! This in turn influences the mass scale clothing that end up becoming “season” trends. Come to think about it, websites are as much as fashion as anything else. With such a quick turnaround period and knowledge actively being shared within the community.
Apple and Google already are seen as the two meccas of product design, but we need design to be played with in the small scales, in the start ups of the world. CRED is a great example of this! A start up which employed neuromorphism for their app in real time which has since been hailed as one of the best designed products in the Indian market. Primarily because their UI is world class which is a well deserved payoff to the experimentation they did!
UI is not all about Buttons
Buttons are important though. But when people say User Interface is not important and design is just an afterthought after function, it really bugs me (yes, pun intended)! What the Yeezy Design film shows us is that Design and function go hand in hand. Your design informs your function and vice versa. These make for the most creative original experiences. There is a nobility behind the idea as well, to make the internet a much more non-serious, less formal dimension which has endless possibilities.
What Kanye did was kind of push the envelope, which showed us a new side to web design itself. Function is not sacrificed, it is still at its core, a shopping website. But it consistently and brilliantly broke every single rule I had seen about composition and web design, while still being governed as strongly as ever by aesthetics. As a result, it took my breath away.
How many websites can we say that about?
