digging and snapshooting digg

I was perusing digg today and the top story for the design sections is Digg's Front Page Stories as HUGE Mosaic Artwork.

Mosaic's of Web sites are an interesting concept as this seems to be the new movement. What I'm basically referring to here is the thumbnail display of sites and not necessarily a mosaic, as mosaics are very complexed and required a long time to create. The aforementioned site took a snapshot of the stories for February 2006. I wonder if it took them until now to finish their work.

More interesting will be to have some algorithm take a daily snapshot and then create the Mosaic accordingly an see if any pattern emerges.

The bottom line is that with a little creativity and some basic design and development skills an individual or group could make themselves stand out from the crowd. These folks at urlyart.com have certainly taken a stab and have obviously succeeded. Of course, there is a more interesting question here, where is the Web heading in terms of Web sites snapshots. Should we all start ramping up and start designing Web sites that are pleasing in a thumbnail view or do appealing sites look good no matter the size. After all, Opera started doing thumbnail views in their browser, IE7, has implemented Quick Tabs showing a thumbnail view of all tabs opened. Snap.com search engine results are driven by a pictorial view and so does Alexa. What's next? where do we go from here?

Labels: Digg, Mosaic, Thumbnails, Web Design