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Great job, very interesting, I like the discussion of Mac-inspired rounded plastic surfaces in current web design and your glitter GIF grid is a knockout.
I wonder if there are class elements at work, too. In America poor people often have yards full of junk and the rich aspire to the “spare artist loft” look. Amateurs can’t hire their own CSS designers and end up filling up their pages with those garden gnomes because they don’t know any better. Whereas a website with money backing hires an “interior decorator” whose first instinct is to get rid of the all the junk.
- tom moody — 8/7/07 @ 9:18 pm
uh, “get rid of all the junk” not “get rid of the all the junk”
- tom moody — 8/7/07 @ 9:21 pm
http://jeweledplatypus.org/pixels/photo/felix-sign.jpg
there’s an interesting discussion of class and web design over at http://www.graphpaper.com/2006/09-04_class-and-web-design-part-1-the-class-struggle
Thanks, britta, for the link to that discussion. The NY Times vs the NY Post is a good example of class warfare playing out in design terms. It doesn’t get into “dirt style” but I’d say that’s its an example of a Category X (artist, boho) appropriation of low class design as a way of twitting the values of high class design. What happens when “dirt style” is written about in Wired and becomes a design flavor of the “classy” shops is another problem.
- tom moody — 8/12/07 @ 8:11 am
And veering slightly off topic–what about MOMA’s page design for its show Automatic Update? I’m guessing that’s a professional designer imitating dirt style or Paper Rad’s “faxel” style. The museum probably couldn’t have asked the artists to design the page because it would violate about 10 museum policies and about 10 more union rules. But then, it was supposed to be a show about Web 2.0 or post-dot com art and the museum isn’t allowed to show Internet art in the galleries because the Net itself is taboo. (People might surf porn.)
- tom moody — 8/12/07 @ 8:23 am
Correction to my own sentence above: “The article you linked to doesn’t get into ‘dirt style’ but I’d say that’s an example of a Category X (artist, boho) appropriation of low class design as a way of twitting the values of high class design.”
Some related graphics are here.
- tom moody — 8/12/07 @ 2:12 pm
That MoMA shit isn’t web design; its graphic design.
- Jon Williams — 8/12/07 @ 11:13 pm
Well, it’s web design in that you go from the main MOMA page to this one and suddenly you’re in this simulated Paper Rad environment of color! and funky out-of-perspective boxes! and then you click through to the del.icio.us page to see what the kids are really down with. And then you use your back button to get back.
- tom moody — 8/13/07 @ 7:53 am
Eh, I just hate graphic designers and their FIXED PIXEL WIDTH BASED LAYOUTS. Give up!!
- Jon Williams — 8/13/07 @ 8:43 am
Man, I hear ya. But they will never give up habits of the printed page and its lovely uniformity.
- tom moody — 8/13/07 @ 9:37 am
they will not if design education continues to be graphic design, and web design is seen as a little sister of it.
tom and jon, thanx a lot for your comments. i was offline.
I’d like to add some of your comments as footnotes to V2.
and i’ll read the text sugested by britta.
about “class”. do i understand you guys right. when u say “class” u mean rich and poor or there is more? For me, who grew with works of Marks and Lenin this word is not that easy to use :))
The article Britta links to goes into painful detail about class (we’re not supposed to talk about it in America either because we’re an egalitarian democracy). Here’s the “nut graf” for me–that class is based on three types of “capital”:
Again according to Wikipedia, in Pierre Bourdieu’s The Forms of Capital, three types of “capital†are identified:
Economic capital: command over economic resources (cash, assets).
Social capital: resources based on group membership, relationships, networks of influence and support. Bourdieu defines social capital as “the aggregate of the actual or potential resources which are linked to possession of a durable network of more or less institutionalized relationships of mutual acquaintance and recognition.â€
Cultural capital: forms of knowledge; skill; education; any advantages a person has which give them a higher status in society, including high expectations. Parents provide children with cultural capital, the attitudes and knowledge that makes the educational system a comfortable familiar place in which they can succeed easily.
So it’s more than just rich or poor but you can go crazy evaluating all these relationships.
- tom moody — 8/13/07 @ 11:26 am
I think a big part of “web design” is to stop worrying and love your browser quirks.
- Jon Williams — 8/14/07 @ 12:38 pm
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