Pop it till you make it

Web design has come a long way, yet we all occasionally see archaic sites that make us cringe. Visual gimmicks, unwanted audio, navigation hell—all these will chase away visitors. In 2021, we decided to collect all these annoying artifacts and turn them into an educational Pop It under the name Debris of Attention.

I made the style utmost bright and light, to avoid any possible feeling of ‘moralizing’. The visuals align with the text, but do not depict all of the listed gimmicks. In each block, I took only one or two elements and played with them.

Most objects disappear by mouse hover (their opacity changes from 100 to zero), then there’s a delay of a minute or two, and the graphic object comes back. In several blocks (especially the one dedicated to animation) I combined several types of animation: an object starts rotating or twinkling on load, and on hover it gets removed. In the ‘Semantic overload’ block the objects get removed by click, and the page gets flooded on load.