I got my check from the RIAA yesterday. Wow... Thirteen friggin’ bucks. Thanks. That should make up for all the money I've spent on CDs. No, really. Thanks. Now I can buy one more CD. Well, not a whole CD, but almost.
Congratulations to Jessie, who won a best actress award at a local short film screening on Tuesday. Also, Yimay’s trip to Taiwan makes me really hungry. Yum...
If you are in Austin today, look to the west and enjoy the sky, captured poorly here by the camera on my handheld as seen from my 13th floor office. No, I didn’t write that comment about Mr. Bush, but I didn’t erase it either.
AIR Interactive for the Arts has been featured on KUT, Austin’s PBS station. Read more about the feature and listen to a sound bite on KUT’s web site. Real Audio Player or Real Alternative is required to listen.
AIR Interactive pairs designer/developer teams with musicians and other arts organizations to build accessibile web sites. This year, Frog Design and Olive Design are among the developer participants and the contest is underway. Look for the results at Knowbility’s table in the SXSW tradeshow.
Last week, I mentioned that the AIGA had relaunched its national web site. I had some complaints about the technical implementation, but I failed to mention the high quality content that accompanied the launch.
Fearmongering: The Brand by Véronique Vienne is a perfect example of the insightful commentary that originally convinced me to join the organization and align my professional career with the principles of the AIGA. Luckily for you, all the articles on Voice: the AIGA Journal of Design are freely available to non-members, too.
The national AIGA web site has been freshly redesigned. While I really like the new layout and color scheme, certain technical aspects of the site leave much to be desired. Before jumping into the critique, I should probably give you some background information...
Last year, I met David Womack, the AIGA Director of New Media. Victor Espinal and I were trying to sell him on the benefits of web standards over their current site’s tag-soup and junk markup. For those of you who aren’t familiar with what “web standards” entails, consider this simile I heard recently: a well-designed web site that does not conform with web standards such as valid HTML and CSS is like a finely polished and beautiful sports car whose engine is held together with duct tape and powered by a hamster wheel.
Mr. Womack challenged me to get involved with the local AIGA chapter and revamp the chapter web site. He also suggested I document the process of how to implement these standards, and how they benefit the site’s users and administrators. Last summer, I took a board position as Web Chair for the Austin chapter of the AIGA. I am still working on rebulding and redesigning the Austin Chapter web site, so I don’t have much to show; the live site is still the old version. We hope to have the new site finished sometime this Spring.
Now back to the point. AIGA just relaunched the national web site whose most abhorrent flaw is the total disregard for accessibility, a web standard. One could argue that blind people don’t need access to a site for graphic designers, but that argument is as narrow-minded as saying that the blind don’t need access to museums. There is much more to museums, and the AIGA web site, than artwork. For example, lectures can benefit both blind and sighted people and the Internet is, first and foremost, a vehicle for dissemination of information. (I’d also like to take this time to remind my readers that web accessibility is not only about the blind, but they are the group most affected by typical web accessibility problems.)
Much of the AIGA’s recent focus has been on design and social responsibility. Conferences have revolved around “Green” design: environmentally-friendly inks, less wasteful paper trimmings on print runs, etcetera. Somehow the social responsibility to design an accessible web site went unnoticed.
Graphic designers are typically some of the most detail-obsessed professionals in any market. My design school professors constantly stressed the importance of attention to detail and quality of craft. You wouldn’t catch any of the national AIGA board members forgetting to kern the letters in a headline, so how a national design organization can ignore such a huge detail on the web site is beyond my understanding. The only explanation is that they don’t know about it.
I still see most designers trying to treat web design as print design. Sometimes I see motion graphics designers trying to turn web into a linear narrative format like broadcast video. Sometimes interactive designers try to turn web into a video game... But it’s none of those things. The web is its own medium. It actually becomes quite liberating once you realize and embrace that fact.
Sure, the web’s limitations are obvious to designers. You don’t have the precision, resolution, and font control of print design. You don’t have the bandwidth and speed of broadcast video. You don’t have the responsiveness of a video game console. Instead, you have so many benefits the other mediums lack.
You have the ability to instantaneously broadcast your message to anyone in the world. You have the ability to create a design where users can customize their font-size, colors, screen size, and a hundred other settings. You have the ability to best utilize the space given to you by the users personal preferences. You have the ability to change style, data, and other aspects of the site based on an infinite number of variables controlled by the web server, user, and other sources. Utilizing web standards allows you to take advantage of all the benefits of the web medium, while still presenting your impeccable design to the vast majority of users that will see your site in a normal standards-compliant GUI web browser.
My best guess is that the AIGA site’s creators just didn’t understand web standards well enough to know how much they would benefit the site.
Now... My complaint is only with the client-side technology... the front-end. I know these are extremely intelligent people and I wouldn’t imply otherwise. Some of the other technical aspects of the site are quite well planned. For example, the chapter web chairs have had an ongoing discussion about the addition of web services to the national site, and it appears the calendar events will be available as a web service soon.
I guess my point is that web design is not taken seriously by other designers and the main reason is that most designers who do web design don’t understand it enough to do it well. There are too many designers who try to force the constraints of another medium. There are too many designers who know “enough” about their day-job and don’t take the time to learn more. There are too many designers who are willing to undercharge and cut corners on quality. There are too few clients who understand the technology well enough to know the difference between a quality product and a cheap piece of junk. There are too few designers who can fully explain those benefits to those clients.
Know and respect your craft, people. Our industry depends on it.
SXSW has opened the voting for the People’s Choice Award for the 2004 Web Awards. You can vote once a day, so sign up now. If you happen to cast your votes for the Accessibility Internet Rally Advanced Training, I’d very much appreciate it, but if you don’t... well... So be it... Jedi.
I’ve had my head stuck in administration hell lately: a fatal hard drive crash on my PC, trying to get the CF Utility working on my Sony Clié, and various Linux headaches on the web servers. Here are a few items of interest I came across since the last post.
More later... Cheers.
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