Good Day. Suddenly everyone has a page. If a business does not have a website, it is hungry for one, often without quite knowing what one is for. MySpace is here, the early social experiments are stirring, and the whole idea of a web presence has gone from rare to expected almost overnight.
Designing in this democratized moment is a strange and interesting thing, because everyone now believes they are a design expert. The word designer has come to mean anyone with a copy of Word. I have lost count of the people who have asked me to build them something like MySpace, and at this point in my life I am not the developer I intend to become, so building a MySpace would be an enormous undertaking I am neither equipped for nor drawn to.
So I keep my focus on the design itself, which in a loud and crowded realm is genuinely difficult. I have found myself drifting back toward print during this phase, where taste still has room to breathe, while keeping a close watch on how things move in Flash, in CSS, in plain HTML, and in this JavaScript that keeps gaining ground.
There are trends I simply refuse to follow, and I hold that line on purpose. Starbursts begging for attention, stacked on top of glossy buttons, became a plague, and I would not touch them. Comic Sans became fashionable in its own way, and I would not set a word in it. You can be inventive without reaching for the cheapest trick in the room.
Did I find something beautiful in the chaos? Honestly, I am not sure I did, and I am not sure I was even looking at it that way at the time. I was heads down, holding a standard, trying to keep clean work clean while the whole web shouted around me.
What the era was really for, and who it served, I could not have told you then. But it taught me something durable about taste. When everyone is suddenly allowed to make things, the value of restraint does not fall. It rises, because it becomes rare.
Jonathan Ellis · Edmonton · September 2006