SmugMug is a website that is a fascinating mixture of beauty and chaos. It is a professional photo and video hosting site that allows users to select from lovely preloaded web designs to showcase their imagery on personal web pages; it also allows certain tiers of users to customize their own pages. This is essential for SmugMug's marketing of course, but it is always amazing to see the train wreck that results from some individuals' forays into design. Creative people can be some of the biggest offenders, and I have to say, some of the resulting web pages are an utter assault to my eyes. I can't fathom purchasing the featured photographs because I can't focus on them long enough to decide if they are any good; instead my view oscillates between a riot of colors and shapes from the images and the competing backgrounds.
For instance, user photographyshed (http://photographyshed.smugmug.com/) has a basic background of dark gray and black with white and neon green text. Most of the individual galleries and sub-galleries use this same scheme. However, clicking on “cars” yields a bright red background, and worse, clicking on “children” yields a beige striped background with graphic toys in baby blue running across the top of the page. These two galleries break any continuity with this user’s main pages, and are hard to look at both individually and in the context of the whole.
Why am focused on this issue of continuity? Because simplicity and clean design demands that pages relate, that some element of color, font, or pattern unites. Photographyshed offers just one example among many that proves that just because you can do something (like pick themed backgrounds) doesn't mean you should.
And while we are on the subject of what you shouldn't do, I can't tell you how many professional photographers have downright forgotten how to look at what they are shooting. Yes, cropping out body parts in a portrait can be done artfully; but really, when did it become acceptable to crop at the ankles or cut off the toes? I think this is an issue with digital technology (which I am in no way berating here) because photographers are so sure they can fix anything in postproduction. They are losing the details because they are forgetting to look. This site offers a flood of beautiful imagery, but much of that beauty is placed right next to mediocrity. This website offers both the best of commercial photography, and the worst amateur mistakes imaginable. And I have to say, the proximity of beauty and mediocrity is in itself somehow both riveting and maddening, and beyond worth perusing. I suppose the poetry of the Internet is indeed that everyone has a more or less equal voice (at least right now), no matter how hideous or elegant their vision may be.
Check out SmugMug here:
http://www.smugmug.com/photos/best-photo-sharing/
