3 ms·
Is modern web design too like print design?
- mechanical_fish 17y agoThe essay leaves out "more clue" as a reason why web design has stopped being clunky, unreadable Myspace-worthy technicolor evil and started to look like something to read. Typography is not a fashion statement. It serves an important functional purpose. This writer actually holds up Hotwired as an example of the sort of "exciting" web design he misses. I beg to differ. The designers at Wired single-handedly prevented me from finding out about Bruce Sterling for ten years and more. Sterling wrote for Wired, Wired gave me headaches, ergo I did not read Sterling. I figured, what could I be missing? Surely nobody who actually knew much about words would exhibit them in this unreadable fashion. What happened to the web is that it grew up, put the fluorescent crayons away next to the blink tag, and realized that print designers had between five hundred and a thousand years of practice in designing readable type and layout, and perhaps this new medium should leverage that.
- tel 17y agoMaybe 10 years of new isn't enough to root out the real design advantages of web in comparison to print. Maybe over the 800 years of print design we learned a few things. The web of today is exciting, but it's also useful and powerful. Overestimating the future is a depressing business.