Behavior is again looking for people who love making great web sites. Mostly we are seeking people for full-time positions, but for exceptional cases we are quite open to short- to medium-term freelance engagements.

We’re specifically looking for the following roles — but as usual we’re on the lookout for web development professionals in all web development disciplines:

• Information Architects (UX, XD, UXD, iXD, etc.): If you read this blog, there’s a strong chance that you are an information architect, interaction designer, or a user experience designer of some sort. I’d love to hear from you, meet up with you, and see your awesome work!
• Design Technologists/Developers: We are seeking experienced, highly skilled, and creatively-minded client-side code developers. You must be proficient and up-to-date in standards-compliant CSS/HTML, skilled at JavaScript, and have hands-on experience with rich internet application interface development.
• Project Managers: You’re a team leader who’s comfortable not just helping the people on your team do what they do best, but you’ve got the vision and experience to plan exactly how to get the project across the finish line. You don’t just coordinate the team — you own the project.

All of these positions are for New York-based on-site work only.
If you are interested in any of these positions, please send your resume (and, ideally, a URL to any work samples or online resources you can provide) to our HR contact at jobs2007@behaviordesign.com. Please mention that you are responding to the job announcement on graphpaper.com.

Thanks!

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Fish Magic, 1925, Paul Klee

It is said that a fish, even a really smart one, cannot really grasp the meaning of the concept “wet” because it is the only condition they know. There is no “dry” to compare it to.

Humans, too, have a tendency to imagine that the way things are today is the way they’ve always been, or the way things will be from now on. It’s hard to imagine that perhaps we are merely living in a transitional period where our worldview is under a temporary spell, soon to revert to the way things have always been.

It has been observed, for example, that representational art — paintings and sculptures intended to mirror what we see with our eyes — has, for most of human history, been the exception not the rule. Optical representationalism has only been the dominant art form for a few centuries, and only in a few limited places: in Greece and Rome in ancient times, and more recently in Europe from about 1500 to 1900. Outside of those periods and places, most of our art has been highly-stylized or completely abstract, from cave paintings to hieroglyphics, from Islamic mosaics to Kandinsky’s paintings.

Viewing modern abstract art as a kind of degeneration from representational art, as many still do, presumes that representation is somehow the “normal” way of doing things. But history shows that this is simply not true. Representational art was and still is a kind of fashion or style, a way of thinking about artmaking that utterly infatuated mankind for a long while, but which eventually receded into the general pool of possible artistic expressions.

The 20th Century Fishbowl

Looking back on the 20th century and the new forms of media and culture that it produced, I’ve noticed an interesting phenomenon: Many of the fascinating social and cultural changes transforming the media right now, in the early years of the 21st century, are little more than reversions back to the ways things used to be before the 20th century. When we talk about “revolutions” in technology and media and how they impact our culture, we should remember that a revolution is a 360-degree trajectory, bringing you back where you started.

The 1900’s saw the emergence of a dozen new forms of media and communication, from mass-market publishing to television to online social networks. Each new media’s birth was followed by decades of adaptation to that media, both social (how new media changes our day to day lives) and economic (how these media have been “monetized”). And as each media reaches maturity and settles down, it’s surprising how many of the social and economic changes turned out to be less earth-shaking than we may have thought. In many cases, we’ve come full circle.

Adopt, then Adapt

The 20th century was a period of continuous infatuation with new technologies, particularly in the media, that felt so powerful that we sometimes thought that these technologies were fundamentally transforming, or even doing irreparable damage to, our culture and our world.

And the evidence for the latter is certainly compelling: Families don’t talk at dinner tables anymore, and instead gather around the TV to watch hours of game shows. We spend hours each day driving in cars by ourselves, polluting the atmosphere. Kids glued to mobile phones in schoolrooms. Reality TV. Internet porn. Britney Spears. Have technology and media really made our lives better?

I actually think we’re not doing so bad. Many of the 20th century’s most infamous technology-enabled cultural degradations may, in fact, merely be temporary effects which inevitably trend back to “normalcy”. In the early 20th century, for example, we invented the automobile and drove around with reckless abandon. But then, after countless accidents and horrific smog, we eventually licensed drivers and regulated the vehicles and roadways. Still later, we crashed our cars reading SMS messages on the freeway, but then we made driving while text messaging illegal. We adopted, then adapted. I hate to characterize this in dialectic terms, but much of it has a distinctive thesis/antithesis/sythesis feel to it.

Some examples of 20th-century phenomena whose transformation has, I think, been exaggerated:

• Reading: Much has been said about how “nobody reads anymore”. Steve Jobs recetnly scoffed at the Amazon Kindle, saying “Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore”. Despite the numbers, which I don’t doubt, I’ve always been suspicious of the claim that we are less literate than we’ve been historically or than we should be. How much people were reading, say, in 1500 or 500 BC. Or even in 1850 or 1900, before mass-market paperback books and magazines were invented. Ursula LeGuin wrote a fantastic deconstruction of this accusation in February’s Harpers magazine, in a piece called “Staying awake: Notes on the alleged decline of reading” (print only –come on, Harpers!). Her gist is that most people never really read all that much anyway, and in that light people are actually reading quite a bit right now. I’ll also add that the supposed high-point of human literacy, which I gather to be the late 1800s and early 1900s, was also the point at which new information technologies exploded on the scene: telephone, phonograph, radio. If people are reading less but they are instead learning things via the spoken word in an electronic media, is that so bad? Were the books and periodicals of the fin-de-siecle any better than the electronic forms that replaced them?
• News: People complain about the increasing partisanship and corporate-bias of the news media. Most of us take for granted the idea that a news organization must be “impartial” or non-partisan. But when was this idea born? I’m not a news historian, but I’d guess that this emerged sometime around the middle of the 20th Century, in particular with the large American corporate news organizations who wanted to avoid favoritism and partisanship in order to maintain a consistent flow of advertising dollars. Before that, however, newspapers were completely dominated either by overt political interests or by their governments. Outside of the USA, too, this is still largely the case. But with the recent emergence in the US of deeply partisan mainstream news media (e.g., Fox news) and the global phenomenon of blogging and citizen/advocacy journalism, we are perhaps witnessing not the emergence of something new or unique, but rather the end of a strange and rather short (50 years?) period in the history of news and information.
• Music: I wrote about this in my last post, which is what inspired this one. Music was once something you could only enjoy as a live experience, in the presence of performing musicians. The 20th century brought us recorded music, which could be bought and sold. This gave everyone the idea that music itself could be bought and sold. With the emergence of digital file sharing, this model is being broken down again, leaving us in a place very similar to where we started, with music being un-ownable, but the experience of music enjoyment being entirely sellable.
• Food: Okay, this isn’t media, but it is definitely technology: From the 1920’s to the 1990’s, the American diet was infatuated with technologically-processed food. Michael Pollen calls this “nutritionism”, a dietary theory that values the chemical composition of food products over the integral food-ness of them, where a loaf of white bread with all the nutrients bleached out of it and then re-introduced through chemical “enrichment” is somehow better than eating a loaf of whole grain bread. The same adopt-then-adapt pattern is here: Humans become so enamored with food technologies — canning, preservatives, refrigeration, and nutritionism — that our diet turns away, for the first time in a million years, from real food. After a few generations of this, and witnessing the resulting horrific health effects, we eventually began to turn away from these foods. Supermarkets now have enormous fresh fruit and vegetable sections in them, incuding organic foods. But when I was a kid in the 1970’s, a trip to the supermarket was like going to a bomb shelter — canned, processed, and frozen foods were pretty much all you could get, because that’s what people wanted. The more the food was abstracted from nature into powders, spreads, flakes, and puffs, the more people desired it — because they perceived it as futuristic, healthy, and convenient. Once we started to realize that the old ways actually had value, when the novelty of snow-white bread and powdered milk wore off, we began to ask for regular food again.

Once I started seeing things this way, I’ve noticed the pattern everywhere: A 20th-century phenomenon is presumed to be eternal, and then its decline is lamented as if it were the end of civilization itself. I learned that nobody plays bridge anymore — but I learned, also, that contract bridge wasn’t even invented in 1925, and had a run of massive popularity for only a few decades before falling into decline by the late 1960s.

Same as it Ever Was?

My whole idea here is admittedly an optimistic argument (and a slightly conservative one, I confess) in which humanity learns valuable lessons by looking toward our past, and where the most troubling social and cultural trends of the 20th century turn out to be merely side-effects of our slow adaptation to rapidly-emerging technologies.

But the opposite is certainly possible: Humanity could continue trending towards technology-enabled illiteracy, junk food-induced decrepitude, social isolation, and retarded media completely controlled by corporate conglomerates. We could quite easily end up with Idiocracy. I could be completely wrong.

Yes, changes occur. Humanity’s greatest social and technological inventions — the wheel, writing, democracy and human rights, the printing press and the Internet — surely have fundamentally transformed the human experience. Some have even speculated that these technologies have brought about physiological changes to our brains, enabling us to use our minds in ways that our ancient ancestors simply could not (see Julian Jaynes and The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind). This may be true (I am skeptical), but I think in the case of most of the 20th century’s most interesting transformations, despite the constant seemingly earth-shattering changes, we are what we are and we will tend to adapt the technology to us, not the other way around.

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Last.fm’s announcement that they will be allowing their users to listen to full-length versions of millions of music tracks is one of the final nails in the coffin of the traditional recorded-music industry. Owning music is dead. The new business model for making money in the music industry is simple: Design a better music distribution system. Or, simply put, build a better user experience for music listening.

Which, interstingly, is how the enjoyment of music has always been throughout the centuries, with the singular exception of the century recently passed. Live musical concerts and performances have always been about more than the sounds in your ears: It’s also the experience of the venue, the culture or subculture of the audience, the smells and tastes. This also applies to live radio, including satellite and internet radio. Both live performance and live radio focus on putting value on (i.e., charging money for) the experience around the music — on the curation, the immediacy, the communal feeling of listening to the same music as dozens or even millions of other listeners — not on the ownership of the recording itself.

In fact, the ownership of recorded music will someday be seen as a weird historical anomaly, born during a decades-long spasm of corporate enthusiam about — and complete control over — the production and distribution of recorded music… a phenomenon in its death throes now that, finally, the ability to record, copy, and distribute music has trickled down into the hands of everyday people.

The era in which one could buy and sell recorded music lasted only about a century, from the early days of the phonograph in the late 1800s to the emergence in the 1990’s of illegal file sharing and now, in this decade, completely legal free distribution of recorded music. We are back where we started: paying for experiences, not for artifacts.

Today’s digital music scene is about experiences. iTunes, for example, is not so much a tool for organizing your music collection as it is a complete media experience platform: It’s the tool to listen to and organize your music, of course, but with the store integration, partnership with your portable player, accessibility to other users on your network, sharing with your TV and home stereo system, it’s become far more than a simple media player.

Last.fm takes it further: Are you listening to something you really like, and you want more? Well, right there on the page, the page that is playing the music, are a dozen different ways of exploring that music further: Talk to other fans, read about the band’s history, view recommendations based on your own listening habits, listen to artists that are intimately related to the band you’re hearing, find out about new music that came out just today.

Valuing Media

Kevin Kelly recently wrote a really insightful and thought-provoking piece about how the value of copied media can be measured:

When copies are super abundant, they become worthless.

When copies are super abundant, stuff which can’t be copied becomes scarce and valuable.

When copies are free, you need to sell things which can not be copied.

In the case of music, the “stuff which can’t be copied” is (among other things) live, performed music. Kelly’s piece explores a few other ways that stuff can be valuable without being copyable — it’s a great read, please check it out.

Last.fm actually hits several of Kelly’s values dead-on, including Accessibility (the ability to tune in from any browser and not be tied to your own hard drive), Patronage (the artist is getting paid by Last.fm, something that many listeners want to know is happening), and Personalization and Findability (Last.fm was literally founded on the idea of making new music findable through personalized recommendations).

Rhapsody was on the right track, but their catalog lacks the kind of Web 2.0 community-generated depth and recommendation tools to make listening to and discovering new music such a delightful experience. On Rhapsody, AFAIK, you are renting access to a database that allows basic browsing by artist, genre, etc. That’s it. It’s fundamentally still about paying for temporary ownership of music.

But as I said, it’s not about owning the music any more. It’s about providing easy and fluid access to the music, exposing you to new music you will like, immersing you in a music community, and making the listening experience as entertaining and interesting as possible. Ownership is no longer an issue. Today you pay for the experience of a product which, in the peer-to-peer era, you can always get in raw form for free or nearly free.

In the future competition in the music industry, such as it is, will consist of better and better ways of competing, essentially, with old-fashioned radio, nightclubs, and concert halls. Last.fm gets this.

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The following is in response to an interesting and thoughtful video and essay by Edward Tufte, posted on his blog/site, in which he argues, among other things, that many of the applications on the Apple iPhone do not adequately take advantage of the iPhone’s screen resolution and its compelling and easy-to-use zoomable UI paradigm.

In one specific case, he advocates replacing the iPhone’s Stocks application user interface with one that displays immensely more information in the same space. He critiques the Stocks app for the cartoonish UI design that wastes space with useless decorative graphic design.

You can see the iPhone’s Stock app and Tufte’s suggested solution side-by-side here.

I submitted the following comment to his site, but apparently Tufte doesn’t seem to think my critique is interesting enough to warrant passing through moderation :-(. So I am publishing it here on my own blog:

You are neglecting the fact that iPhones are *mobile phones*, designed to be used primarily by people on the go, or by people who are otherwise occupied. The cartoony UI screens are designed to be usable by people who are walking, talking, riding on a train or bus, waiting in line, bored in meetings, and (unfortunately!) while driving.

Typical iPhone usage lends itself well to the information-thin designs you criticize precisely because it does not attempt to do more than deliver the most important information in a heartbeat. The “image resolution” style of information design you advocate is great for someone using an iPhone while sitting in a comfy chair with lots of time on their hands, or for someone who posesses no other information platform (i.e., no desktop or laptop computer). But for most users, they will use the iPhone to informally keep their finger on the pulse, and use their main computer to actually think about and analyze data.

There is no need whatsoever for someone on their way to work or waiting in line for a sandwich to know what a stock is trading at down to the third decimal place, or for them to see a historical sparkline. In fact, I would contend that 90% of the benefit of the stocks app is in the colors alone — even if there were no numbers at all and just red and blue boxes, the design would be effective.

I find it ironic that Tufte is actually advocating the addition of more information to the screen, something which would seem wholly out of character for him. I suspect this is because he is thinking about the iPhone’s UI as a graphic design challenge, not as a component in a larger lifestyle-based user experience. He doesn’t view the iPhone as the object of delight that most iPhone users I know find it to be, and instead he sees it as a straightforward challenge of graphic efficiency. IMHO, he’s overlooking the most important part of the user experience.

Resolution

I also want to add that Tufte’s focus on the word “resolution” is revealing. He praises the iPhone itself for its high-resolution screen. He seems to extend the word’s meaning, too, in an intriguing way to include the fact that the iPhone’s zoomability effectively and elegantly increases the available screen resolution without adding what he calls “administrative debris” in the form of scrollbars, etc.

These are great thoughts, but is he playing with the meaning of “resolution” deliberately, or is he simply impressed with the iPhone screen’s dots-per-inch? Perhaps another view into this question is through Tufte’s insistence on posting his video as a 56-megabyte Quicktime file instead of as a one megabyte YouTube or Vimeo enclosure. He apparently cannot bear to post this video in a low-quality streaming video format, preferring crystal-clear resolution over ease and speed of use. This seems to relate directly to his more general fetishization of “resolution” as the saving grace of all screen-based communication.

From all of this, I am not getting a strong feeling that Tufte is up to speed on how we do things on the Internets these days.

If this is Tufte vs. Jobs, this one goes to Jobs hands-down.

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In today’s Times, I read a story that included a fallacy that I’m pretty fed up of hearing: The accusation that web-based news and journalism is overly brief and shallow, that it caters too much to the short attention spans of ADD-addled youths, and that the web is ushering in a new era of crappy journalism:

[Panasonic President Toshihiro] Sakamoto said he has a “dream” of seeing a newspaper presented beautifully on a television. (I hate Internet news, he said; it’s just a series of small sound bytes and quick updates. He’d prefer to see the entire paper).

I have to ask: Exactly which InterWeb is he looking at? Certainly not the one I am used to getting my news from.

My entire experience of Internet news has been deep and substantive, the polar opposite of this stereotype. All of the major news services have moved gracefully and effectively into the Web, IMHO. The most avid news consumers, too, now voraciously consume online news, including the new citizen journalism of blogs. So why does this myth persist?

I mean, it’s not like there’s any evidence. Newspaper web sites include not only the exact same full-length stories featured in their print editions, but they usually also contain tons of deeper content than their paper counterparts, such as background information, raw reporter’s notes, news from other news services, plus more photography, audio, and video. Even TV news web sites run AP and Reuters news stories, not to mention uncut transcripts of their TV reportage, and go far, far beyond anything they show on the air.

Web news is everything print news and TV news is — and more. There’s simply no way you can argue that Internet news isn’t in every way superior in depth and quality to the news delivered in other media.

The only reasonable conclusion I can make is that people who argue this don’t actually read news on the web but want to sound like they do. Maybe they watch short videos clips of news stories now and then, or read the home pages without clicking to read the actual articles. But they can’t possibly be reading real news web sites and contend that the journalism is lacking in depth and quality compared to other media. I suppose they can’t even conceive that the real news on the web is delivered in a traditional but time-consuming medium: Words.

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The One Laptop Per Child, officially known as XO, is now appearing in people’s mailboxes. The unboxing photos are up on flickr. The OLPC buzz is hot!

But I’m a little sour about it. It feels like I have read nothing but breathless praise for the design and implementation of the devices, both the hardware and the software. Mixed with the kudos there have been some critiques of the methodology and pedagogy behind the whole project, questioning the idea of giving laptops to third-world kids in the first place and criticizing the designers for arrogantly avoiding user research and for not testing the device with real third-world kids. But even the harshest critics of the project seem to have nothing but praise for the design and even for the usability of the devices.

So why am I not excited? Well, to put it bluntly, I find the positive reviews of the UI design extremely hard to believe. From what I’ve seen, the UI bears all the hallmarks of a user interface disaster, a case study in designer-driven design. I don’t understand why the whole UX world isn’t awash in skepticism over an OS that looks all the world like a Microsoft BOB for the Wallpaper* set.

At some level I suspect there is a certain degree of reluctance on the part of user experience critics to stand up and say something bad about a project whose objectives seem so noble and generous. Maybe it’s a “if you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all” thing.

So I have a challenge for UX pundits and professionals who are also proud new owners of the XO: Say something nice about the Sugar UI. Or say something critical. But talk about the user interface for real, in detail, and don’t hold back.

Don’t just talk about how awesome the project itself is, about the great minds behind it, or about the clever hardware and the cool mesh network functionality. Talk about the usability of the software. Think of how the design might be different, how it might work better.

I’ve not actually used an OLPC yet (I hope to very soon). I have seen a lot of screenshots and videos, however, and have used the emulator a little bit. But even the screenshots give me a deep, gut feeling that something is very wrong with this user experience. To wit:

• The game-like and oft-abused spatial metaphor, suggesting that the relative positions on the screen are where other people actually are in the real world.
• The circular menu — a darling of academia, unproven in any real-world context. As with the spacial metaphor, I think this idea has promise, but seeing it on the XO tells me that the designers simply want to prove a point.
• The idealistic and haphazard usage of language-agnostic iconography, which falls apart at every turn whenever words become unavoidable, defeating the whole point of using icons.
• The frequent lapses into a menagerie of half-baked and crappy open source user interfaces.
• The exposure of hard-core programming tools to extreme novice users (especially the choice of the ubergeek language Python!).

And, oh, those icons!

I can’t get over the creepy similarity between the Sugar UI’s icon for a person and the internationally-familiar “skull and crossbones” symbol, in particular its incarnation as the icon for minefield warning signage. Wealthy first-worlders might not see it this way, but if you live somewhere where minefields actually exist, and where children have been injured and killed by them, this might not be such an extreme connection. Not to push this too far, but the military term for a minefield/landmine is “UXO” (unexploded ordinance).

I hate to come across as bitter or petty here — I am actually quite sympathetic to the idea that technology can play a big part in the education of kids living in poverty around the world. I actually hope to be able to read some convincing arguments that the Sugar UI is great. In particular I would love to hear that it can and does work well for third-world kids.

The key word here is “convincing”. So far, much of the design commentary has been praise based on the pedigree of the team behind it — MIT Media Lab, Pentagram, Fuse Project etc. I want to get beyond that and talk about the UI itself and how people use it. Of course, this may take a while to emerge as the devices make their ways into the hands of children around the world. This is obviously a developing story.

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I bought Peggy a new pair of studio monitor headphones for her birthday last week. So now we have an extra pair of my favorite headphones, the Sony MDR-V600. I decided to try an experiment I’ve always wanted to do: To separate a pair of headphones from its cord.

My practical objective was in part driven by the onset of winter’s cold: I wanted to figure out a way to use full sized over-the-ear headphones with my iPhone, without losing the ability to use the iPhone’s wonderful on-cord control doohickey (which allows you to pause, play, or skip tracks, as well as being a hands-free microphone and call controller).

So I opened up the headphones, cut the cord down to only a few inches, and soldered the shortened cord to the contacts inside the headphones themselves. I closed everything up, and the result can be seen above.

Now, what about the iPhone’s clever controller cord?

Shure makes a nifty little doodad that does exactly this: it has all the functions of the iPhone doohickey, but instead of having any headphones of its own it allows you to plug your own headphones into the female socket on the end of it. Many users of the Shure cord complain about all the excess cordage that results from using this with a full set of headphones. But I think with these no-cord headphones I’ve managed to completely avoid that problem. I’ve just now ordered the Shures from the Apple Store, and I look forward to plugging these two things together and rocking out in the cold weather.

This idea, in fact, has been bouncing around in my head for several years, long before the iPhone. I’ve long thought that headphones, especially high-end headphones, should come in two peices: (a) the part that goes on/over/in your ears, and (b) the cord. Headphone cords could then come in a variety of lengths, colors, and features. So you could choose a 10-foot long phone-like coiled cord for use as you dance around to your latest track in your home music studio, or you could choose a compact lil’ 2-foot cord for when you are keeping your iPod nano in your breast pocket.

In my original conception, the headphones would have no male plug on them at all. They would merely have a female socket, while the cords would be male-to-male. But since female-to-male headphone extension cords, like the Shure model, are a more common (and more useful) accessory, I opted for the female-to-male approach for the headphone cord.

Finally, I just realized that I can also simply plug an iPod shuffle directly into the headphones and go completely cordless, rocking out with a single dangling iPod earring.

UPDATE: Well, the Shure cord arrived yesterday, and the whole setup works great. The cord is short — just long enough to reach my pants pocket. It is not an inch longer than it needs to be. The sound quality is fine, the industrial design is solid. Success!

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I’m not going to say much about Kindle — as an iPhone owner, I find both the device and the service colossally dumb.

But the breathless excitement over the supposed “death of the book” is even more preposterous than Amazon’s little white elephant, especially to book lovers like my wife and me. For us, books, periodicals, and printed matter of all sorts comprise, quite literally, the very structure of both our intellectual and physical worlds. Books surround us. Our loft is subdivided into rooms using bookshelves. Every surface has a stack of hardbacks, paperbacks, and magazines on it. We both grew up surrounded by the printed word — looking at them, feeling them, smelling them — and we intend for our family to continue in that tradition.

Books are the building blocks of libraries, and our libraries reflect who we are. John Gruber’s critique of Kindle as a profound rip-off for true book lovers is spot on:

So the Kindle proposition is this: You pay for downloadable books that can’t be printed, can’t be shared, and can’t be displayed on any device other than Amazon’s own $400 reader — and whether they’re readable at all in the future is solely at Amazon’s discretion. That’s no way to build a library.

Here’s a far better idea, one that book lovers who also happen to be technophiles would love: Bundle print and digital copies of books together for the same price, perhaps as a very small cost increase (say 5%) to the basic print price. You can think of it as a free digital backup copy, or as a digital reference edition. Other advantages include:

• Scholars, journalists, and reviewers can use the digital copy for searches, citations, quotations, and literary analysis.
• References to external sources can be clickable URLs.
• Since so many digital book owners print them out, the bundling will inevitably save a few trees.
• Having a digital copy precludes the need to print an index in the physical book. There’s no need to even construct one in the first place — let users simply search it digitally.
• While I still think DRM is evil, it wouldn’t be quite so onerous as long as a physical copy was in my permanent posession.

John Gruber includes this fabulous Emerson quote in his review:

If you would know how a man treats his wife and his children, see how he treats his books.

Many of the core lifestyle and business ideas behind Kindle are, frankly, an affront to what I love about books. What is most surprising is seeing Amazon — of all companies! — treating book lovers in this way. This is not innovative thinking at all.

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At the Speak Up graphic design blog, Armin Vit laments the lack of “landmark” or canonical web designs. After giving several examples of iconic designs that are truly landmarks in the history of graphic design, from Paul Rand’s IBM logo in the 1950s to Paula Scher’s Public Theater posters in the 1990s, he writes:

Myself, I could list projects in every category from logos, to annual reports, to magazine covers, to packaging, to typefaces, to opening titles that could be considered landmark projects… But when it comes to web sites, I can’t think of a single www that could be comparable — in gravitas, praise, or memorability — as any of the few projects I just mentioned.

Joshua Porter, however, thinks that Armin is barking up the wrong tree, arguing at his own blog that Armin’s singular focus on graphic design is misguided:

But, frankly, I think Armin has missed his own point. He wants to know what web designers see as canonical, but he’s dismissing the obvious answer because it doesn’t fit into his canonical mold of graphic design. In other words, he’s looking at Google from a graphic design perspective, when web designers necessarily have to look at it from an interaction design perspective.

If Armin were to ask web designers and web development teams what the canonical web designs are, he would get very clear answers.

Joshua then goes on to cite Google and Amazon as canonical web designs because they do what they do exceptionally well — and that doing things is what web design is all about. He continues:

So while Armin doesn’t want this to be about graphic vs. web design, it has to be at some level because web designers necessarily approach design from a different perspective than graphic designers.

That’s where he loses me. This is, at least to Joshua, just another turf war between interaction design and graphic design, an unfortunate debate that I had hoped had been put to rest in the last decade.

Joshua is buying into the idea that “graphic design” on the web is at best a lesser practice than some other, bigger thing called “web design” (which he says is really “interaction design”, but whose purview also apparently encompasses programming, strategy, content, information architecture, interaction design, and presumably even graphic design itself).

It’s certainly a good thing to talk about web design holistically and to see all of these things as interconnected, but must such discussion be at the expense of graphic design? Is discussing graphic design off limits? It’s clear that Armin was talking specifically about graphic design, but Joshua sees this not as a professional focus but, rather, as a fundamental shortcoming.

Perhaps Armin brought it on himself by using the phrase “web design” when it seems he really means “graphic design on the web”. Given that Speak Up is a *graphic design* site, I would have thought this focus would have been presumed by most readers. But when Joshua compares Google to Armin’s historical graphic design examples, and then claims Google’s iconic stroke of genius lies in its functionality, he is doing the equivalent of claiming that:

• Milton Glaser’s Dylan poster’s “design” includes Bob Dylan’s lyrics
• Vignelli’s subway map “design” includes the engineering of the trains and tunnels of the NYC transit system
• William Golden’s CBS logo’s “design” includes the groundbreaking journalism of Edward R. Murrow.

Joshua is casting too broad a net by claiming that web design is everything when clearly Armin is focusing deliberately and precisely on the profession of graphic design.

Armin is not talking about functionality, and that’s okay! He is talking about the color, typography, shape, layout and all the other formal elements that make up a site’s graphic design. Hell, Armin would probably be quite happy to see just one truly great logo for a web-based product, a logo whose design has the same timeless gravity as the logos from the history of graphic design. Instead we get endless swooshes and reflections.

Is it wrong of Armin to ask for this?

Well, only if it is wrong to want excellence in graphic design. On the web.

Back to the 90s

Why is it that when we talk about web design, “graphic design” is often treated as the red headed stepchild? In other media, and in older times, we can talk about the genius of a particular product’s graphic design independently of the larger system that that design represents or serves. We can talk about the graphic design of the Westinghouse logo without talking about the engineering of a Westinghouse refrigerator. Why should we not be able to do this about graphic design on the web?

My theory is that many web professionals, even graphic designers who work exclusively on the web, look down their noses on the crafts and traditions of “graphic design”. They have been doing this since the early days of the web, back in the 1990s, when it was common for smug young designers to feel superior to print-based graphic designers who didn’t yet know what they were doing on the web. How many of you slick web design professionals remember a time back in the 1990’s when we laughed at the poor old graphic design geezers trying to make HTML pages using Quark Xpress?

Well, those days are over. The joke is old. And you know what? All these years of people believing that graphic design was a lesser discipline, of contending that graphic design is barely an important factor in the bigger picture of web design, have led to precisely the predicament that Armin is complaining about: Web sites, in general, still don’t look as compelling as the historical graphic and visual icons we’ve come to know and love in other media. His point is entirely valid, and Joshua’s attitude only manages to prove Armin’s point. Graphic design on the web kinda sucks.

And as long as we continue to insist that graphic design is a non-entity, we will never have good graphic design on the web.

(I’ve written about this before when I argued last year that the AIGA fell into the same trap when they decided the G no longer means “graphic”. It’s sad that it’s still happening.)

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