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A Deep Study into the History of Web Design

Authors:

David J. Crandall,

Norman Makoto SuAuthors Info & Claims

WebSci '17: Proceedings of the 2017 ACM on Web Science Conference

Pages 329 - 338

https://doi.org/10.1145/3091478.3091503

Published: 25 June 2017 Publication History

Abstract

Since its ambitious beginnings to create a hyperlinked information system, the web has evolved over 25 years to become our primary means of expression and communication. No longer limited to text, the evolving visual features of websites are important signals of larger societal shifts in humanity's technologies, aesthetics, cultures, and industries. Just as paintings can be analyzed to study an era's social norms and culture, techniques for systematically analyzing large-scale archives of the web could help unpack global changes in the visual appearance of websites and of modern society itself. In this paper, we propose automated techniques for characterizing the visual "style" of websites and use this analysis to discover and visualize shifts over time and across website domains. In particular, we use deep Convolutional Neural Networks to classify websites into 26 subject areas (e.g., technology, news media websites) and 4 design eras. The features produced by this process then allow us to quantitatively characterize the appearance of any given website. We demonstrate how to track changes in these features over time and introduce a technique using Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) to discover sudden, significant changes in these appearances. Finally, we visualize the features learned by our network to help reveal the distinctive visual elements that were discovered by the network.

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Cited By

Andrew SBishop CTigwell G(2024)Light and Dark ModeProceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies10.1145/36435398:1(1-23)Online publication date: 6-Mar-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3643539
Shi YGao TJiao XCao N(2023)Understanding Design Collaboration Between Designers and Artificial Intelligence: A Systematic Literature ReviewProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36102177:CSCW2(1-35)Online publication date: 4-Oct-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3610217
Kaluarachchi TWickramasinghe M(2023)A systematic literature review on automatic website generationJournal of Computer Languages10.1016/j.cola.2023.10120275(101202)Online publication date: Jun-2023
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cola.2023.101202
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Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

WebSci '17: Proceedings of the 2017 ACM on Web Science Conference

June 2017

438 pages

ISBN:9781450348966

DOI:10.1145/3091478

Conference Chairs:
Peter Fox
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, USA
,
Deborah McGuinness
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, USA
,
Lindsay Poirer
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, USA
,
Program Chairs:
Paolo Boldi
Universita degli Studi di Milano, Italy
,
Katharina Kinder-Kurlanda
GESIS - Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences, Germany

Copyright © 2017 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

Sponsors

SIGWEB: ACM Special Interest Group on Hypertext, Hypermedia, and Web

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 25 June 2017

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National Science Foundation
Indiana University and NSF RaPyDLI

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WebSci '17

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SIGWEB

WebSci '17: ACM Web Science Conference

June 25 - 28, 2017

New York, Troy, USA

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WebSci '17 Paper Acceptance Rate 30 of 85 submissions, 35%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 245 of 933 submissions, 26%

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Cited By

Andrew SBishop CTigwell G(2024)Light and Dark ModeProceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies10.1145/36435398:1(1-23)Online publication date: 6-Mar-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3643539
Shi YGao TJiao XCao N(2023)Understanding Design Collaboration Between Designers and Artificial Intelligence: A Systematic Literature ReviewProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36102177:CSCW2(1-35)Online publication date: 4-Oct-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3610217
Kaluarachchi TWickramasinghe M(2023)A systematic literature review on automatic website generationJournal of Computer Languages10.1016/j.cola.2023.10120275(101202)Online publication date: Jun-2023
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cola.2023.101202
Sonje SDave HPardeshi JChaudhari S(2022)draw2code: AI based Auto Web Page Generation from Hand-drawn Page Mock-up2022 IEEE 7th International conference for Convergence in Technology (I2CT)10.1109/I2CT54291.2022.9824521(1-7)Online publication date: 7-Apr-2022
https://doi.org/10.1109/I2CT54291.2022.9824521
Epstein ZGroh MDubey APentland A(2021)Social Influence Leads to the Formation of Diverse Local TrendsProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/34795535:CSCW2(1-18)Online publication date: 18-Oct-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3479553
Goree SDoosti BCrandall DSu NKitamura YQuigley AIsbister KIgarashi TBjørn PDrucker S(2021)Investigating the Homogenization of Web Design: A Mixed-Methods ApproachProceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3411764.3445156(1-14)Online publication date: 6-May-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3411764.3445156
Zheng SHu ZMa YCulpepper JMoffat ABennett PLerman K(2019)FaceOffProceedings of the Twelfth ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining10.1145/3289600.3290610(774-777)Online publication date: 30-Jan-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3289600.3290610
Liu DCao YLau RChan A(2019)ButtonTips: Design Web Buttons with Suggestions2019 IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo (ICME)10.1109/ICME.2019.00087(466-471)Online publication date: Jul-2019
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICME.2019.00087

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