> David Carson once said, “don’t confuse communication with legibility.” We should apply this advice to the current state of web design.

Granted I didn't go to design school, but efficiency and the ability to be understood are pretty high on my list.

Take example 2, not only does it scroll jack for a square pattern, there are things that highlight but aren't clickable, there's a gif that's chewing up CPU cycles, and this seemingly functionless page requires 58 requests, 48MB and somehow 1.2 minutes to load according to chrome dev tools, compare to loading the HN homepage in 1.1 seconds.

I'm not an advocate for turning the internet into a server of pure text files, but when art and usability are head to head, usability must win every time or your users will go somewhere else.