How design can save your wallet. And save you, too.
Black Friday. Do you need anything? You (probably) don’t.
What if we could hack Amazon’s homepage for a day and transform it into a place of harmony and spirituality instead of a loud market square you’ll throw your money at?
A few years ago, an artist named Piet Mondrian proposed that underneath the texture of nature, there is a foundational structure of rectangles, lines, and primary colors—a place of beauty whose rhythm brings us closer to the truth.
That’s something, right?
Piet Mondrian, Tableau I, 1921, oil on canvas, 96,5 x 60,5 cm, © 2013 Mondrian. Ludwig Museum, Cologne. Picture taken by me.
What is that other thing that is built with lines and rectangles? The web.
Rectangles filled with text and images, rectangles with rounded corners we want people to click on (aka “buttons”).
What if the truth has always been lying underneath all our interfaces?
I was in front of a Mondrian in Cologne last week. I finally got it. The truth lies underneath all web pages, including Amazon’s homepage.
Let’s see if I can redesign Amazon’s homepage to demonstrate my point.
First, get a home page screenshot and draw the basic structure.
BTW Amazon, “Pump up the joy”? 😱
Second, let’s start adding color, bringing in some grey (very present in Mondrian’s artworks), and rotating the “UI” in portrait (vertical) mode to move away from the usual “browser view” for a sec.
It’s pretty ugly still, but we’ll get there.
Now, I’m merging the rectangles and starting to add some rhythm. The lines and the rectangles must open up to extend our UI to a potentially unlimited, infinite space.
How well will the Amazon homepage overlap with the underlying structure we identify? I got something like this:
Only some adjustments are left to ensure the content gently fits our spiritual grid. There it is:
Of course, some functionalities will be missing. The search bar will not have space, so it’ll have to go, and most noticeably, all the “Shop now” calls to action will be gone.
With a browser frame, you can now enjoy the beauty of a shop where nothing can be shopped. This is the underlying foundation beneath all our UIs.
That was Mondrian’s Black Friday miracle.
If Friday is black—add red, yellow, and blue was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
