On the home page, there are 10 main links, with further links as you go deeper into the architecture of the site that are logically grouped. There is no sense of hierarchy among the navigation systems because it is not necessary; the main navigation system disappears once you click on one of the links, taking you to another page with secondary links. The site was designed this way because of the sheer amount of content on the website. A breadcrumb would help, but if the secondary/tertiary links were to remain on the page as you went into the third/fourth level of the site, the links would probably take up half of the page. For example, the “Rejected Posters” category in the “Pictures” section contains 69 links. The main navigation moves to the bottom of the page once you leave the home page, and addition links appear that is made obvious by the blue and underlined text conventionally is used to signify a hyperlink.
There is an absence of a breadcrumb or a selected state, since once you click on a link, it takes you to a new set of links or to a final page that displays what you were looking for. Therefore, you do not always know where you are within the architecture of the site, which is not flat. The links are all very specifically and accurately labeled, and there is always a link, no matter what page you are on, at the bottom of each page that takes you back to the home page.
Because of the sheer amount of content, this website has a deep architecture. For example, http://www.dribbleglass.com/subpages/strange/pictures.htm has well a couple hundred links by itself. There is a clear sense of typographical hierarchy, but one way to improve on the aesthetics of the text would be to not have a Times New Roman font and decrease the size of it. Some of the techniques used to distinguish between the headline and subheads from the content were letter-case, weight, and contrast.
Pages have a consistent structure for the most part, but there are some with navigation systems that jump from one place to another. This does not seem logical, and I believe the site was poorly designed. Therefore, I cannot come up with a valid explanation as to why the pages were designed this way.
The focal point of most of the pages is either a picture or the title of the page. In the case for photos, this is due to the fact that it contrasts greatly from the background of the webpage; for the title, it merely has to do with its massive size. For pages that are largely filled with text, there is an absence of imagery/photos, and it would break up the text-heavy pages well, making the information less overwhelming. They make minimal use of iconography, such as bullet points, and they could be easily recognizable as to what they meant.
Shades of blue, white, and black are the main colors of the website, and they are used to separate content by having blue indicate a link/button, and black representing the content. These colors were chosen to go along well with the hundreds of links that are on a page with blue and underlined text, and to match the personality of the website, which serves the purpose of offering useless and trivial/educational facts. There is a search function that is obscurely placed at the bottom of the website, and can search for specific phrases by using quotations. It does not have the capacity to filter searches, like specifying the section to search for.
The one and only feature I liked was the options available on the home page. They were links to which a lot of people would probably be most interested in. On the other hand, I was easily confused by this site since you either had to hit the back button on the browser most of the time to go back or click on a button that served this same purpose, but was not obvious until after you clicked on it and realized what it did. Furthermore, the navigation systems jumping in multiple places also frustrated me, although I could easily find them, since they would obviously be somewhere on the page. I think they could improve it by keeping the navigation in one place so that people can refer back to it rather than look for the navigation before being able to maneuver among pages. A breadcrumb or having a selected state (the latter would only work if they maintained the position of the navigation systems in the same place) would be another way to improve on the website.
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