9x9 Pixels, The World’s Smallest Website(s)
When Steve Jobs introduced the iPod 15 years ago, he famously presented it as 1000 Songs in Your Pocket. It was incredible.
Today, the Spotify app on the iPhone alone gives you access to over 30,000,000 songs.
Apps are magic buttons. There are over 1.6 million for each and every purpose. Apple even created a marketing campaign around it, entitled: “There’s an app for that.”
You’d think by now there would be hundreds of apps performing unimaginable feats for us at all hours of the day. However, just eight years after the App Store launched, the majority of us only use 5–10 apps frequently.
As a result, if you’re building a software company today, there’s a good chance that you’re trying to build a home screen app:
That rare, delightful, 120 x 120 pixel button that teleports a person from nagging boredom to the entire world’s catalogue of published music; to one of the tiniest most powerful cameras ever made; to an on-demand date with one of 10,000s of beautiful partners in your area.
That button, that if you’re lucky, makes you and your 54 closest friends almost 20 billion dollars.
-
In the late ’90s, the gold rush was focused elsewhere on web portals. They were mashups of news, search, email, weather, stock quotes, and entertainment. Web portals stuffed in whatever they could, ideally creating a comfortable home that people would rarely have to leave.
A lot has changed since.
We came to realize that in many cases, specialization is actually the key to building a giant business. Consider the world’s second most valuable company, Google, whose homepage has remained almost unchanged (aside from evolving to become even simpler) in 20 years.
Now consider Yahoo, the world’s best known web portal. Yahoo IPOd for over 100 billion dollars, and today they’re apparently worth negative 4 billion. Their web design followed the opposite trajectory of Google’s, getting more complex each year.
In character, in style, in products — in all things — the supreme excellence is in simplicity.
As we move towards smaller screens with more limited real estate, simplicity in product development and visual design is essential.
You’ve probably heard that logos should be legible regardless of scale. Consider the Medium logo. It reads well when it is large. It reads well in the top left of this page at the size of your fingernail. It reads well when it’s 16x16 pixels in the favicon in your browser tab. Successful products follow the same rules.
The next time you’re building a digital product or designing a website, consider the 9x9 rule. If your design is too complex to identify at 9x9 pixels, it‘s probably too complicated.
Consider the following examples: 9 of the most popular websites in the world.
Can you make them out? Let’s magnify them to roughly the size of the favicon in your browser tab. How about now?
If you’re a heavy Internet user, you’ve probably identified half of them already.
It’s amazing how much information you can convey in just a 9x9 pixel grid.
If you haven’t identified the sites after looking at the image above, scroll to the top for a bigger set with a legend.
Are there valuable technology companies that don’t follow minimal design practices? Of course. I’ve even included one of them, Buzzfeed, in the 9x9 set to highlight the contrast in minimalist and maximalist design.
YouTube, Amazon, MSN, LinkedIn, and eBay are a few popular sites that were difficult to represent in 9x9. Some products (Amazon is the everything store) are impossible to represent simply. It’s no secret that a product can be successful without simple design, and simple design does not necessarily make a company valuable.
That said, if you were to ask executives at these companies if they would like their design to be simpler, and you’d hear a resounding yes. In some cases it’s not a priority, and in others it may not even be an option (i.e. Amazon).
If you’re presently starting a product from scratch, especially a mobile product, consider giving the 9x9 rule a try. It may help you simplify your design thinking.
Check out the full 9x9 project here.
If you enjoyed reading this article, please hit the ♥ button in the footer so that more people can appreciate great design!
Hi, I’m Daniel. I’ve founded a few companies including Piccsy (acq. 2014) and EveryGuyed (acq. 2011). I am currently open to new career and consulting opportunities. Get in touch via email.
You May Also Like: Design for Humanity
An interactive essay I wrote exploring the past, present, and future of anthropomorphic design. Also available as a talk for conferences, events, etc.
