My friend Margaret IM'd me a link this morning to Shop Composition, who tout themselves as selling "Modern Goods for Modern Living". Margaret and Communication Arts both think the design is great: elegant, smart, etc. (Comm Arts named them Site of the Week a few weeks back.)

I humbly beg to differ: this site sucks. It embodies everything I find extremely irritating about Flash based sites: it's impossible to navigate with the back button, you can't send a link to a friend, you can't pull down a photo to use for your own reference. Aside from that, the navigation and information design to, you know, buy something is utterly clueless. I was perusing their dog collars, thinking of getting one for my dog (that link is special for you, Ms. M). Not only do they not explain their sizing conventions, but they give the striped collars solid color name assignments (brown, orange, pink). I'm a smart girl, and able to figure out what's what, but you know, I want to be reasonably certain that I'm not going to have to return something that I buy online. This is too much of a crapshoot.

The final straw.

They categorize their items thusly: New, Her, Him, Living, Work, Play. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that the Him section contains Martini glasses and "smart, fun" flash cards dubbed The New Math whereas the Her section seems to be soley focused on... jewelry. It make perfect sense - as Barbie once infamously stated - Math Is Hard if you're a girl.

Modern? I think not.