Dressed In Value is a graphic design studio in Louisville, Kentucky.

Saturday, November 08, 2008

Love of web

In a recent meet­ing I was asked what I love about the web. My mind went blank. Or, rather, I could only think of what I didn’t like about the web. So, I began with, “Hmm,” a pause, and “Well, I can tell you what a I hate about the web.”

This con­sisted basi­cally of the fact that com­put­ers and inter­nets so often pull me away from other real life pur­suits (we can put the dis­cus­sion of my self-discipline deficiency aside for now). I sit in front of my com­puter more than I sit in front of an open book; more than on my bike in front of an open road. 

So much reliance has been given the social web and mobiles for instant com­mu­ni­ca­tion that a hand-​written letter — some­thing I think most people would surely cher­ish — has quite nearly been ren­dered obsolete. ”But,” I con­tin­ued, “there’s so much to love about the web, too. It can bring people together where it was oth­er­wise not pos­si­ble.” I hate it and I love it. 

Love of work

In my hand­ful of years involved with the design­ing and build­ing of web­sites, I have been learn­ing that love of work, as defined by per­pet­ual, unend­ing joy and curios­ity, is not sus­tain­able. We are, how­ever, encour­aged and told by the indus­try and peers that any­thing oth­er­wise isn’t enough, or actu­ally insuf­fi­cient for the job. I spend a lot of time read­ing the latest web­sites and keep­ing up with the industry’s latest, but I often grow weary from it. It never stops, and it doesn’t appear that it ever will (which is actu­ally good for the devel­op­ment of the web, a neces­sity for any indus­try I suspect).

Obvi­ously, with any line of work, there will be indus­try changes to be made aware of and keep up with. I do not argue against this. But graphic design on the web has turned much into any­thing but graphic design. I would not say it is now ‘sci­ence’ where it was once ‘art’ because graphic design has always been, in print and on web, a bal­ance of both sci­ence and art. 

What this is not about

Please don’t mis­take me for some­one who ‘doesn’t get it’ (the web). I under­stand the web all too well. I under­stand it’s a com­pletely dif­fer­ent medium than its pre­de­ces­sors. I under­stand that there are com­pletely dif­fer­ent sets of tech­ni­cal matter and acces­si­bil­i­ties to keep in mind when design­ing and building.

But that’s not what I’m talk­ing about here. What I’m talk­ing about is that, for all the good the web is said to bring (and has indeed already brought), there are just as many down­sides. And right now, and per­haps for a while now, it’s on my mind that web design­ers at large have been more con­cerned with get­ting things ‘right’ accord­ing to tech­ni­cal stan­dards rather than making things that are a sheer plea­sure to look at and use.

I’ll offer a vague anal­ogy. A window frame can be beau­ti­ful, but the pur­pose of a window frame is to frame a pic­ture of what is beyond it. The image of yonder. 

A different approach 

I sup­pose you could say there are only so many ways to design a book. There are some things you just can’t change. We read left to right, top to bottom. We start at page 1 and con­tinue through the last. And there are def­i­nitely sim­i­lar laws of design on the web. I try to keep this in mind when I see web­site after web­site of the same format (my own!), but I can’t help long­ing for some­thing dif­fer­ent. A dif­fer­ent focus. A dif­fer­ent perspective.