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July 1st, 2012 
FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda Jason Amunwa is on a mission to beautify the web. He works at digital-telepathy, the design studio that created SlideDeck and HelloBar.com, and specializes in web and user experience design. He spoke with Relaxnews about the changing face of web design in the age of social media and smartphones.
Visuals have become an essential part of storytelling on the web 2.0.
Over the last decade we have witnessed a gradual shift from text-based websites to interactive, image-rich sites which delight the viewer with engaging visuals. In recent years the trend has seen image- and video-sharing social networks such as Pinterest, Instagram and Viddy gain viral popularity with users and older social networks like Facebook update their design to cater for the photo-loving community.
But why are photos and videos becoming so popular on the web?
“Right now, I believe we’re seeing the rise of visual storytelling on the web,” said Jason Amunwa, Director of Products at digital-telepathy. “Writing an engaging article or blog post that gets a lot of traction is tough, and requires a large investment of time — there’s a lot of friction there that I think prevents more people from engaging in content creation, as opposed to passive content consumption. It’s a lot quicker and easier to take a picture, add a filter or comment, and share it. Applications like Pinterest and Instagram reduce the friction of creating shareable content, and lower the barrier for people to hop in and participate.”
Photos are the future
It’s a similar story on social networks like Facebook and Google+ where developers have added larger photo previews, bigger profile pictures and new layouts that are more conducive to photo sharing in light of users’ newfound addiction to image sharing on the web.
Facebook recently acquired hugely popular photo sharing app Instagram for a reported $1 billion — a clear sign that photos are a large part of the social network’s future.
In the months since Google+ has launched, thousands of users have already started building their online social connections around their passion for taking (or viewing) photos. There’s a monthly Photography Scavenger Hunt in which hundreds of Plussers submit and are judged on their own definitions of the month’s categories and frequent video “Hangouts” with famous photographers including Trey Ratcliff, Thomas Hawk, Colby Brown, Scott Kelby, Jim Goldstein, Scott Jarvie, Victor Bezrukov and Alex Koloskov, who freely share their tips on photo taking and editing with the G+ community.
“When you first look at G+, you can tell that photography wasn’t an after-thought,” American photographer and Google+ Photographer’s Conference organizer Scott Kelby told Relaxnews. “Google+ was the first to give you large enough image sizes right on your page that you don’t have to click to see a larger size to enjoy them. If you look at the other social sites, they’re all starting to follow Google+’s lead on this, because they’re starting to realize that this stuff matters to us. Not to just photographers, but now that everybody is carrying a decent point-and-shoot camera around in their phone, photos matter more than ever. It’s a visual-sharing world now, and G+ embraced that from the start.“
Sites and applications such as Pinterest and Instagram have leveraged good visual design to gain traction and create engagement with users, said Amunwa.
“Just as retailers like Target and Fab.com are bringing high-end design within reach of everyone, Instagram makes improving a photo through the use of filters incredibly easy; Pinterest enables people to easily showcase their design sensibilities through curated collections of imagery. The growing popularity of these tools fits in with a wider consumer trend that favors good design and an enjoyable user experience.”
App-ification
The emergence of the smartphone and the touch screen have been two of the most significant influences on web design in the last five years.
“Nowadays, we’re seeing a proliferation of new design techniques, influenced in no small part by mobile app design — bigger fonts buttons, longer pages that encourage you to scroll more, javascript interaction, and responsive layouts. Others have called this the ‘app-ification’ of the web, and it makes sense — consumers love the experience of their native mobile apps, and are increasingly demanding the same experience in their browsers,” explained Amunwa.
The appification trend is expected to continue as mobile devices like tablets and smartphones proliferate and web designers cut their ties with print-influenced design.
Amunwa said, “we’re starting to see designers leave behind the old metaphors of the print medium that early-adopters used to make the transition to the web seem less scary to the mainstream. Putting important content ‘above the fold’, linking between separate ‘pages’, even ‘scrolling’ – these are becoming outmoded concepts in web design, as the mainstream gets used to using the web, and designers learn to leverage the strengths of the web medium.”
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