Chameleon green.

After all that, it seemed logical to take a look at the site of that great surreal blob Dutch lot, NOX, led by Lars Spuybroek. It is at www.noxarch.com. Like Douglas and King's site it is Flash-based, but I found the lower two thirds blanked out by a big grey band with sub-text all squashed up. Uhoh. Not another lazy web designer. Very possibly. With my standard Mozilla browser abandoned in favour of Internet Explorer it all worked fine with a full-screen graded, acid-green home page with some tiny text. I don't know why but the only way to enlarge tiny text in this and the above Flash-based site is to right click and zoom in. Naturally the site has some fascinating content--and displayed as individual thumbnails in a changing slide show. But the real innovation is the fact that you can change the background colour from that acid green to any combination of two intense primary colours. There is a tiny text button at the bottom right reading Background which gives you the choice. I can't imagine that the trick is all that difficult to achieve but simply being able yourself to change something about the site gives you a surprisingly good feeling about NOX. No. Don't necessarily all go out and make your site's background colour user-adjustable. And please, go easy on Flash. Maybe don't use it at all. Most web people class it on a par with Japanese knotweed.

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