An administration created an "America by Design" initiative and a National Design Studio aiming to improve how Americans experience government online and in person. The announced site exhibits poor writing, typos, and tepid visual choices, including flag imagery and common product-site animations. The site is a single HTML page that nonetheless requires almost three megabytes of code to render. Serving a three-megabyte page creates a significant data burden for users on prepaid or capped home plans. Data overages can be tremendously expensive for millions of Americans with limited data.
Last week, my country's far-right administration announced they were establishing an "America by Design" initiative, along with a so-called National Design Studio to oversee it. That studio will, to quote its own homepage, "improve how Americans experience their government - online, in person, and the spaces in between." After seeing the announcement, I read through the "America by Design" web page. And I have some thoughts.
The text is poorly written, and filled with typos; I expect both of these things on my website, but not on an announcement of this scale. And aesthetically, the design is...well, tepid. Once you get past the literal flag-waving in the header, there's some text that slides in as you read - something you've seen on every other product site that's launched in the last decade.
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