NOTE: The following is random filler, because I kind of got on a roll trying to put something up on this page... don't pay too much attention to it.
The explosion of the Web presented those of us with years of multimedia
design experince with the same distressing situation faced by typesetters
and graphic designers ten years ago when desktop publishing exploded onto
the scene. The sudden influx of a lot of folks looking to make a fast buck
and selling their "skills" and the resultant flood of incredibly
bad Web pages. I don't have a problem with personal pages - many are fabulous
examples of design, or have exceptional content, or, occasionally, both.
But I strongly approve of anyone who makes the attempt to communicate. But
people touting their Web or graphic design skills, should have something
to back it up.
Case in point: Recently, if you surfed to the NetScape "Developing
Web Services" pages, you were immdiately faced with an advert. from
a group saying:
"Before you get too deeply into HTML, check us out."
If you clicked on their button (and I am curious as tothe cost of this ad
and whether NetScape looked at the site before taking their money...) you
were presented with one of the worst commercial Web pages I have ever seen.
First time there, I found a background which made the light colored text
completely unreadable without changing the background - I suspected they
had never looked at it from a Mac based browser. I e-mailed them about the
problem, and the next time I looked, they had changed the background, but
to no good purpose, because what could be seen was ghastly, if you were
looking for a good quality comercial site. When will BLINK finally die?
End of site specific rant...
Eventually the public will tire of bad pages, and designers will again have
some effect. And, as in the past publishing revolution, a fair number of
people, who would never have had the chance to find this out otherwise,
will have discovered that they ARE good or great designers, and give up
whatever they were doing and contribute to the evolutin of this new medium.
More later...
Back to Argyre's Home Page