Dreaming spires.

One website that grasps all this readability stuff is that of New York and Cambridge landscape architect Michael Van Valkenberg at www.mvvainc.com. Following a rather laborious load-up time during which you get views of various Van Valkenberg landscapes in a letterbox across much of the top of the screen, you click on the faint Projects. There, rather intriguingly, you are instructed to 'rollover the squares for information' and there on the right are five landscape types with a row of squares against each. This being landscape, the squares are actually rectangles. Whatever, you roll over to one of the squares and there on the left the instructions are replaced with the name, location and date of the job. Click again, and there you are with three expandable thumbnails and a descriptive text. To get the rest of the images you click on the array of 'squares' on the left. It all works logically and effortlessly. But here's an oddity. When you have seen enough of the always-imaginative work, you click on the Back to Projects box and, hey, the whole thing starts slowly reloading again. There are plenty of sites out there, stuffed full of images, that don't make you hang about. Maybe this is meant to be all part of the dreamy landscape thing, squares that are actually rectangles, swathes of placid water and planting. Maybe it could all speed up a tad.