What’s the web good for?
Kia ora koutou,
A rare dispatch. It’s been a while!
More and more, I’ve noticed that programming and software engineering-centric views of web design are often grounded in massive misunderstandings of the medium and how it works.
This is a draft of some ideas that run counter to established conventions and stereotypes of the web being a container for ads and apps, limited in capability compared to game engines and native frameworks.
Drawing from the origins of web design in 1990s digital culture and graphic design traditions, we can trace a drastically different perspective that points to the unique potential of the web as a design medium.
Click Parade
The idea of skeuomorphism originated in the confluence of digital products and industrial design. It’s now shaping the form of the oversized trucks choking city streets in America, Australia and NZ.
The indomitable Mandy Brown on how the story that ‘artificial intelligence’ tells is a smoke screen. This remains relevant after the chaos of the OpenAI board playing musical chairs and the wild uptick in mainstreaming of cultist derangement following Yudkowsky in Time magazine implying that missile strikes on Chinese data centres are necessary for the survival of humanity.
Henry Kissinger—the grand strategist of mass killings—was finally yanked out of Death’s claw machine last week, perhaps marking the endgame for exuberant collective consciousness on what was once Twitter. Chile is one of many countries that suffered through the process of US-facilitated political violence (later rebranded for millennials as ‘regime change’). ‘The Santiago Boys’ is a deep dive into the lost tech future of the Allende government’s Project Cybersyn which raises important questions for technology, labour and intellectual histories.
A study of living organisms in the Pacific garbage patch shows how a unique habitat of plastic rafting is emerging in the open oceans. A new mutant ecology forming in the flotsam and jetsam of fossil-fuelled consumerist ruination.
R&D work in progress
Recently, I’ve been experimenting with various editor prototypes combining ideas from spreadsheets, grammars and tag editors.
I’m not fully convinced yet, but the adding/deleting from lists interactions here do feel a bit more satisfying than wrangling JSON syntax in a text editor.
The Web as a design medium
People constantly flip out at the dizzying complexity of current-era web development and its performance and engineering problems. When you study it through the modern moniker of the ‘Web Platform’, directly facing the wall of complexity, it’s easy to miss the subtlety of how so much of this chaos and angst is a product of software engineering culture, not anything intrinsic to the medium.
As a maligned discipline spanning four decades, web design is a gateway to thinking about the web as the white whale of 1990s graphic design and digital culture: a vision for the ultimate networked medium of digital journals, magazines, zines, amateur publishing rings, experimental net art, interactive media, photography, comic art, animation and games.
“Images and words are breeding”
‡ Rick Poynor, Typographica (Princeton Architectural Press, 2002)
Despite lofty ambitions and ongoing attempts by designers to push the boundaries of the medium, early efforts were an extreme struggle a lot of the time. Netscape and Microsoft’s two major browser projects blundered out incompatible 2D box models, forcing a frustrating endianness-style complexity onto visual interactivity. Moving elements around dynamically, treating the viewport like a drawing canvas could quite easily crash the entire browser. Sophisticated interactive content was handled through specialised plugins like Shockwave and Flash.
What could not be achieved immediately was incrementally fixed and refined, with incomprehensible bugs becoming less frequent and standards becoming more widely-supported over time.
Amongst ongoing corporate demands for app-focused features to be added to specs, classically-trained designers approached the new medium seeking answers to perennial typographic questions about visual scale, rhythm and repetition.
In 2017–2018, twenty years after the initial CSS specification became standardised, stable and perpetual support for grid layout rolled out to the mass audience of browsers. Finally, it was possible to realise the original graphic design vision of the web where layout should serve the content.
“We’ve all been doing orderly and sturdy, because we don’t know what else to do. Just out of habit, just because somebody else did.”
‡ Jen Simmons (An Event Apart, Austin, 2015)
The launch of these powerful and flexible features for enhanced typography and content delivery was a high point for web designers, but it has not been so impactful on the broader visual culture. It takes time to change workflows and expectations around how websites are supposed to look. The web in general is not particularly receptive to a visual revolution right now, given its ongoing state of crisis, polluted and perturbed by intrusive advertising, disinformation, political influence ops, monopolism and enshittification, all subject to the deranged whims of billionaire accelerationists.
Many critics of this current state of the web are operating at incommensurable levels, some lapsing into a moral panic language of network contagion, populism and addiction; others obsessing over the raw tokenisation of lexemes and graphemes processed into large language models. This thinking often neglects the baseline visual representation of glyphs laid out on a surface as affecting the way information is communicated and understood. The material elements of the medium made out of glowing coloured light.
The rise of algorithmically-mediated ‘content’ and ‘content creation’ implies a flow of information into fixed containers, rather than content both shaping its container and being shaped by it: the latter, a mental model which is much more congruent with conventional design wisdom around the relationship of form and function.
High quality typography and editorial design. Structured layouts that tell stories through visual arrangements of contrasting elements. Runs of text locked into fascinating asymmetric and symmetric compositions. Zines and amateur publications that are free to draw from the whole history of graphic design and break with convention.
That is what the web is good for.