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Beauty and the Beast in the online space… will they ever be together?

by Raul Sarrot

Imagine Beauty. Sensuous, fresh, engaging, surprising and innovative. It’s easy to call the new web flash interfaces ‘Beauty’. They are beautiful pieces of design and interactivity indeed. They offer a new way of navigating —sometimes intuitive, some obscure or experimental— but often they become a complete new online experience. What up until not long ago was exclusive territory of some design studios and/or some self indulgent digital art related experiments, Beauty is now opening its wings and is also seen in the mainstream online world, as online promotions or even a full online retail offer (mostly food or fashion related).

Now imagine The Beast. Something that is relatively new and yet still unknown. Something that grows incredibly fast, no one is quite sure how to control it or what it could become in the future. People still don’t know if The Beast is good or bad. I call The Beast those online platforms whose whole purpose is to offer access to a monstrous amount of data (mostly those living under what is known as ‘web 2.0’). I’m referring to those sites where people (you and me included) can read articles or news, buy things, communicate and share thoughts, life experience, log the most banal comments, photos and any other thing in between. The criteria here is keep it simple, technical and easy to understand and navigate (well, sometimes perhaps not even that). The important thing, quite obviously is the content, the data, the access to information (either written or visual). It’s this ‘data’ that feeds the crowds, and it’s these crowds that feed The Beast. A full circle. Very few times we see here an attempt to cross pollinate a hint of the Beauty (this is not meaning that simple and easy is not beautiful).

The Beast, mostly those sites related to social networking, add another dimension to the ‘old-school communication’, expanding it infinitely to make it available to audiences you didn’t even know existed or that they’d be interested in what you do or say.

Beauty and The Beast are expanding, exploring new frontiers, either in the communication/networking aspect or on the visual/interactive experience. Each one seems to grow in such a different direction yet at the same time they are so close together living in the online space.

Now, the question is… are they going to ever be together or are they simply growing further apart?

Certainly there’s hope. You can already witness experiments on how an integration of a beautiful highly interactive online experiences could relate or link to a heavy content driven site. For now, that’s about it. They seem to be getting to know each other. I hope the fusion or integration comes soon…

Would this be real or is it just me reading too many fairy tales?

PD: see here some links of what I’m referring to. Would be good to see you if have any other examples of early integration.

http://www.christmastweets.co.uk/
http://www.orangecinemaseries.fr/evenement/trueblood2/