Cotton reverie
Three drafts sitting on my Wordpress dashboard (not including this one) have all fallen prey to good intentions and apathy, a heady cocktail which leads to lack of writing impetus. One draft extolls the trials and tribulations of a now defunct endeavour, another tells of my process of building web forms, and the other remains sealed against the elements. This diatribe is unique among them in that I had already written a large swathe of vitriol only for it to be mercilessly erased by the clipboard.
For those that know me in person and for those capable of reading between the lines (which say “people who use the term Web 2.0 are fucking morons” and “the iPod is mass-market design, urban living kitsch”) will know my severe aversion to the term “Web 2.0”. My vendetta is really more focused towards the ethos and environment surrounding the term. Latte-drinking, logo-less upstarts who try and tell me about “user experiences” and “AJAX” and all sorts of buzzwords, marketing or otherwise. The technology that The Term encompasses are sound and interesting when placed in the right light, an equally weighted light that doesn’t have a halogen bulb, strobing different colours over Ruby on Rails and XmlHTTPRequest; everything else branded with a vomit coloured table-lamp that I’m sure just screams Web 1.0. Another facet of the “Web 2.0” umbrella is the idea of the “user”. As if this was a foreign concept before, it now falls in line with lots of the other buzzwords. The concept of the “user experience” though is not just valid, it’s paramount, and it’s the technology driving that experience which has been the innovative push; no revolution just evolution.
The visual design of “Web 2.0” though is a personal bugbear of mine. The iconic gradients and vapid, barely illustrative graphics and unnecessarily large text and white-space was at first refined, then flogged and beaten. Beyond the hype and my revulsion of the unwashed masses claiming they have designed something is The Hook. It’s the hook of belonging to a group. Leet (l33t) speak caught and spread so quickly because it become a global in-joke, a way to discern those who know the secret handshake and those who don’t. When the younger users of the net were clamouring for their identity, l33t speak provided it like dialects and colloquialisms do in real life. And now, the people who take their design cues from Apple, wanted to be part of their own group, a rising chorus of “one of us”.
Some design choices are restricted by technology though; not every page is a homepage and dangling curtains is more often than not, the best way to make a template. But such a ridiculous usage of white-space seems criminal on some layouts, as if screen real-estate has become so abundant that we can choose to ignore large portions of the screen, leaving them to the great white void.
So when something like SimpleBits redesigned themselves, I shrugged and rolled my eyes. The steady decline of the once-greats has been slow and inexorable; Zeldman, Holzschlag and Cederholm have all become about their constant jetting around to conventions or about their families. Neither of which are uninteresting, but it seems that once you’ve published a book, you rest on your laurels. But I digress. I commented to one of my friends at the time that as long as MezzoBlue remained stalwart against “Web 2.0”, I could have faith. MezzoBlue was such a pitch perfectly design site; layout, colours, mnemonics, everything just clicked and worked well. The transition to it’s current “design” marked a watershed for me. A lighthouse of where the late-giants are heading.
So my current work in progress for this site tries to be everything that others seem to have left behind (RIP Shaun Inman.com): neat, graceful and intuitive. I do not need to shout my headings, nor gradiate my bars and pander to some group design mentality.
