Brian Piana's Textless Web Site Art

Artist Brian Piana has created a series of works based on website layouts, stripped of text and images. By removing the "content," the works expose a layer of visual design and information architecture which holds its own as art. From the Artist's Statement:

I search for sites with ties to compelling personalities, engaging storylines, or controversial issues. The tapestry of connecting lines and iconographical shapes found in The Last 100 Offenders Executed in Texas (Who They Were and What They Said), for example, is informed by the actual Texas Death Row website. In terms of a website, it is a complete mess, devoid of any practical sense of design, organization, or planning.  With this piece, however, I have tried to harness that chaos and present it instead as a refined and structured narrative that engages the topic of capital punishment.

Pictured below is a mini version of the Last 100 Offenders piece mentioned above. See Piania's gallery for lots more. If you're into this kind of thing ("data-based illustration"), check out our previous coverage of Ben Fry's Linkology, Atari 2600 Cartridge Source Code as Art; and Eva Schindling's movie dialogue visualizations.