Making MySpace My Space

MySpace has recaptured a 1990's standard of web design most of us hoped was long forgotten. But the mighty hero CSS was ready and able to beat MySpace into submission. It's time to make a MySpace profile look good.

To date, I have designed my own MySpace profile and just recently Jessica's. Mine was a result of diddling around in Photoshop for a half hour. Jessica's was a more tedious effort as I had an actual goal in mind. I combed through volumes of stock photos before landing on the image of the raised hands for my zombies (it came from an image of a rave). It was by far more rewarding. It looks loads better than mine already and it's still a work in progress. Feast your eyes on these babies because you won't see another good-looking MySpace profile in a long, long time.

• Mike's MySpace profile
• Jessica's MySpace profile (looks better if you don't use Internet Explorer, because it can't handle PNG transparency)

If you want to read my concise take on wretched pit of despair that is MySpace design, then by all means...

What went wrong with MySpace design?

MySpace has taken the Geocities standard of web design and made it bigger. Bigger meaning the amount of bandwidth your connection must ingest to actually load any MySpace profile completely. A friend of mine's profile clocks in at over 10MB, about three songs in MP3 format. The users are to blame for that, much like Geocities' users were to blame for their seizure-inducing, Vegas-inspired designs.

In this day and age, social networks that allow you to create your own home are also gracious enough to give you a few preconceived designs beyond the standard default to make your site a bit more personalized. MySpace offers nothing of of the sort, leaving users to style their sites on their own. Most people (I originally wrote 'users'. Try not to get too detached Mike.) can appreciate good design but they couldn't create their own to save their life. So when these people try to personalize TheirSpace, you end up with a lot of primary colors and neons and colors of the like that basically you should never ever use.

Sites that offer MySpace templates, otherwise known as ready-made MySpace pages, do little to help. They reliably invoke the same design failures present in the past, the worst and most common offender being designing for a specific browser and resolution. That one-two punch will have its user pleased (as punch, I got it), but everyone will see an 800x600 image of the beach tiling its little heart out.

I'm not the first to bring sanity to the MySpace mess. Others have created gorgeous, bulletproof (not so easily broken) profiles. I just wanted a challenge and a break from updating squarehappy (har har), but I couldn't let these CSS skills atrophy. MySpace is the final boss in the game of web design. It is irrational and unforgiving. It will force you to unlearn all which you know to be true. Still, it seems like there's an untapped market for good MySpace design. Go ahead and tap it, because I'm too lazy to.