Pictures: No Longer Worth a Thousand Words

I'm generally a big fan of fansites. Sometimes if I'm lucky I happen upon one that was designed by someone who clearly knew what he or she was doing, and I learn a bit about graphic design as an art.  I discovered one such site a while ago, two or three years ago, in fact.  It's called SoulieJolie.com, and it was discovered on one of my Angelina Jolie picture hunting sprees. (Yes, I'm an Angie girl.)  I've been a fan for a while now, even before the general public began swarming around her and elevating her to one of the most prominently recognized celebrities in our culture.  But because of this boost in fame, a large number of Angelina fansites have popped up on the web.  SoulieJolie was able to keep my attention largely for the things that Lupton talks about in her latest chapter:  organization, text, and convenience.  Granted, my interest was first caught by the beautiful slide show at the very beginning before you get to the meat of the site, so to speak; part of the slide show is pictured below.

However, Lupton's point about text and legibility of a site being more important than images (in spite of the terribly overused "picture's worth a thousand words" cliché) resonates in the layout of SoulieJolie's main page. The designers of the site chose a simple San Serif font, Verdana, for the body text of SoulieJolie, and they were careful to regulate the use of their fancier script like the elegant but sometimes unreadable Scriptina.  In this way the designers maintain a uniform layout by using a limited number of fonts while still upholding Lupton's theory of the importance of text, as seen by the harmony created by Verdana and Scriptina.  The site is easy to navigate because all the directional options are listed at the top of the page just beneath the header in clear, easy-to-read script; this is much cleaner than some other fansites I've visited, where text is often covered up (in an attempt to be "highlighted") by images.  Lupton, however, maintains that "text can often provide a more specific and understandable cue than a picture." SoulieJolie's maintenance crew seems to have understood this statement.  There's no confusion, there's no overload of fanciness, yet it manages to keep a certain air of uniqueness about it.

Bonus:  I would definitely say that the media culture of today has a huge impact on the way we expect to receive information.  In the high-tech world of internet/gadgets/fast food and the like, we have come to rely upon immediate gratification.  Everything comes at us instantaneously, whether it's food, satisfaction, reactions, or information.  This is how we want our websites to be as well.  It's not in our nature to enjoy searching for things; they should be handed to us straight out, not hidden or in need of deciphering.