An analysis for the Apple website
Apple Inc is a multinational corporation that designs and markets consumer electronics. Their website reflects their products through its simplicity but lively and easy to use appearance. The three main characteristics of the Apple website is its simple style, the use of images and the fixed menu bar.
Simplicity
The whole website chooses to use a light colour scheme, with a plain white background and cream, grey coloured boxes to contain the site’s content. The website uses regular black or grey font for the text; although occasionally images and texts are placed directly onto the plain white background instead of being placed inside a box. Also, the boxes used by the website all have rounded corners. Information is organized into grids or columns, both within and between the boxes, which makes it simple to navigate. These techniques make the website seem very simple and clean cut. Kress (1996) says that a simple layout draws attention more than a cluttered one, and this is what Apple have done with their simplistic style.
The text in the website, such as descriptions of products are kept short, only two or three sentences, and so simple to skim over so that the reader can get the list of the information in a matter of seconds which Lee (1999) says is important since most readers have a short attention span. When the readers are interest in a particular product they can click on the hyper link and gain access to the full detail description. In this way, the main pages can quickly display the entire apple products without making it appear cluttered. But, this also makes it easy to find detailed information about the products. For the latest models the apple website uses bigger font to standout whereas the older products use slightly smaller font. They also use light grey for the descriptions and black for the title lines, drawing the reader’s attention to the titles first.
The minimalist style gives a clean look, since there are not much elements on the web page. The layout is easy to understand it makes the website easy to understand and use while giving it a very sleek feeling to it.
Images
The site uses white background for all images, by doing so no attention is drawn away from the product in the image and it adds to the simple style Apple goes for. The photos of the products are often dramatic and colourful, and the apple products the images usually feature real people using their product, and not celebrities and they seem very happy and excited. Kress (1996) suggests that images of real people give readers a very personal feel about the product and that the reader can relate to the people in the images and therefore identify with the product. This contrast between the images and the simple background draws attention to the products. Goatly (2006) argues that in many advertisements the product is presented by the visuals, settings, characters and so on, which draws attention away from the product. But here the simple style doesn’t distract from the product at all.To help readers engage with the images of iproducts shown on the website often have pictures of applications showing on particular product, for example a game application shown on an iPod touch screen. It is worthy to note that the applications are all very colourful which is eye catching and draws people’s attentions to the functionality of the products.
Throughout the website there is a fixed menu bar at the top of the screen. This menu bar can navigate the reader to any of the main areas of the web page or use a search function to find what they are looking for. This menu bar is visible on every single page, which means that no matter where in the website the reader goes they need to only scroll to the top of the page to keep control of where they are going. This gives the reader the impression that they never feel lost or confused in the website. The fixed menu bar makes the apple website user-friendly.
The overall effect
In conclusion, the apple website uses light colours with an effective use of white space. On top of this the website uses clear, minimalist typography and use a lot of icons to emphasize the text meaning. This makes the website clear and easy to read, while still presenting a lot of information. The overall design of the apple website is to make the website as simplistic and easy to use as possible. This is because the design of the apple product also focuses on simple to use and sleek design styles; therefore their website reflects what they are selling with their products.
References
Goatly, A. (2006). Critical reading and writing. London: Routledge.
Kress, G & van Leeuwen, T (1996). Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design. London, England: Routledge.
Lee, M and Johnson, C (1999) Principles of Advertising. London, England: Routledge.
