writing » sites for sore eyes
“I am appalled at what I see on the Web”, Bran Ferren, senior VP of creative technology at Walt Disney, told a conference of World Wide Web developers last December.
Branding the Web's content “aesthetically challenged” and the “embarrassment of the online community”, he lambasted the leading Web authors gathered at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for focusing on the technical while ignoring the visual and the emotional. “Go find yourself an artist ”, he urged the audience. “Find architects and poets and put them together before people lose interest”.
The attendees, basking in paeans to the Web's phenomenal growth, gave short shrift to this gadfly. But most designers who have visited the Web-a community of interlinked graphics heavy sites residing on the Internet's computers-will agree with Ferren's assessment. For all its progress, the Web is an aesthetic wasteland, with precious little content that exploits the medium's possibilities and lacking in visual metaphors that capture the experience of Web travel.
Until about a year ago, Web pioneers could justly claim that grey backgrounds, left justified text and humdrum graphics were all that was possible. Technical limitations of the available design tools and browsers (software for viewing Web pages) tended to homogenize the look of the Web: everyone had the same icons, horizontal line breaks and bullets, and everyone posted Under Construction headers as apologetic nods to these shortcomings.
But in the three years since the Mosaic browser first allowed Net tourists to see the Web in pictures, the technology has advanced by leaps. It is not easy to construct sophisticated layouts, render attractive yet quickly transmittable graphics, or incorporate multiple media into cohesive presentations.
But it is possible.
The latest specifications for HTML (the lingua franca of the Web), adopted by major browsers, now support columns, height and width values for graphics, and color and textured backgrounds.
New versions of Netscape Navigator, Microsoft Internet Explorer and other leading browsers promise to allow the simultaneous display of two live pages. Java, Acrobat, VRML and Director files are all coming to the Web, bringing animation, interactive multimedia, virtual reality, 3D imagery typographic liberation and other design instruments.
So why is Web design not keeping pace with the technology? The reason lies largely in the medium's speed of growth, which has afforded little time to develop a lexicon for online communication. Browser developers, striving to position the Web as the marketing and business communication medium of the future, seem to have convinced everyone that they need a Web page, even if few understand why.
The booming demand has spawned a cottage industry of Web design studios, most of them too busy pumping out standard-issue graphics and layouts to address more fundamental issues of form, function and language of the medium.
Commercial Web pages, the Web's fastest growing segment, are also most in need of sober re-evaluation. The raison d'etre for most corporate sites is the desire to be hip -a “build it and they will come ”faith in mere presence. So in-house techies are sent to hack something together, ignoring design in the rush to put something up: static visuals from print brochures are scanned and reformatted, ad copy is typed in default browser font, and the company declares itself Web-enabled in TV spots and business cards.
Others err in the opposite direction, slavishly embracing technical wizardry while little thought goes to the value of content. Such self-serving online billboards which ignore the medium in the message are destined to be cob-Webs- all gussied up in the latest software fashions, they sit by the phone waiting for someone to call.
Web page creators and their clients much face the fact that simply having a Web page no longer buys cachet. The content must be useful, easy to navigate and visually compelling to appeal to some of the thirty million wanderers clicking their way through cyberspace. Web sites must also recognize the culture of Internet denizens, many of whom feel commercialization constitutes pollution of their environment, clogging communication arteries intended for loftier pursuits.
My search for innovative Web design found, not surprisingly, that the best work is usually done by people with backgrounds in design and graphic or fine arts-individuals with a keen understanding of communication and presentation. On the following pages, I showcase four sites, each different in purpose, concept and look, but all exemplifying thoughtful composition, innovative visual treatments, and consideration for the medium and its audience.
