Yes, Web Pages Are Art
Web pages are created by spraying electrons onto a photo-sensitive surface which excite individual dots of color to glow. These dots of color are called pixels. In 1981 IBM introduced the Color Graphics Adapter (CGA), which was capable of rendering four colors, and had a maximum resolution of 320 pixels horizontally by 200 pixels vertically. By the Summer of 2003 Dell was selling 15-inch Flat Panel monitors with 1024 x 768 pixels for $322.
Why Terry Brooks Believes That Web Pages are Works of Art
- If a web page is created by spraying electrons, then it is the product of a mechanical process.
- All mechanical processes are engineered by human beings (A religious belief of Terry Brooks)
- A human being - way back when - decided to write left-to-right, top-to-bottom [for our culture!]
- An aesthetic was born, where our machines represented language left-to-right, top-to-bottom.
- By now this aesthetic is so assimilated that we believe that it is "The Way Things Ought To Be"
- But if this aesthetic is merely an arbitrary convention; then we could do things differently
- ipso facto if a web page is an arbitrary written convention, it is art
So what is an aesthetic?
Answer: An identifiable style. What's a "style"?
Answer: A pattern. What's a "pattern"
Answer: The same thing again and again
Still don't believe it? Look closely and see if you can find an example of the same thing over and over again.
Style has frequently been equated with the manner in which something is expressed, as distinguished from the matter being presented. When this view is adopted--when style is taken to be the domain of how things are stated, as distinct from what is being asserted--choice tends to be understood as a decision between alternative ways of "saying" the same thing. (Leonard B. Meyer. Toward a Theory of Style in The Concept of Style, edited by Berel Lang, 1987, p. 26)
What might the "Standard Information Aesthetic of the Age of MTV" look like?
One Suggestion: USA Today
In a recent New York Times Sunday magazine article on school textbooks, writer Robert Reinhold described California's new history series as "...filled with colorful charts, graphs, time lines, maps and photographs in a format suggestive of the newspaper USA Today." There it is again. Since when did USA Today become the national design ideal? Everywhere you look you find USA Today used as an analogy to describe a noteworthy design format. Making ideas 'accessible' is the operative term for the information age. But too often information is drained of its significance in the name of accessibility.
Some things are designed for reading: scholarly journals, literary reviews, financial pages, and their ilk are fairly impenetrable to the casual page flipper. Other objects like USA Today, annual reports, fashion magazines, and so on are for looking...Then there are the gray areas. These include news magazines and textbooks, which imply reading but are increasingly about looking.
The trend in typography is clearly towards a destruction of narrative text, with images increasingly responsible for carrying the content. Running copy is being replaced with exaggerated hierarchies, charts, graphs, sidebars, boxes, captions, and call-outs that reduce the "story" to a collection of visualized pseudo-facts. It is the design equivalent of the video sound-bite, with complex ideas boiled down to 'manageable chunks.'
"Since When did USA Today Become the National Design Ideal?" Michael Rock. In: Looking Closer: Critical Writings on Graphic Design. Eds: M. Bierut, et al. Allworth Press, 1994
One of these web pages uses the standard information web aesthetic, one doesn't. Which one feels comfy and "normal" and which one forces you to actively decode it? Are your emotional responses to these web pages random information accidents or have they been carefully calculated by the artists who created these pages?
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Axel Killian: Defining Visual Space through a Visual Language, MIT 2002
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Is this very page - the page that Terry Brooks created and is using as a teaching device - is it an example of the Standard Web Information Aesthetic? Could Brooks not only be talking about the Standard Web Information Aesthetic, but be using it at the same time? Are there similarities between the USA Today example and the layout on this page? Use of color, spacing, etc.?
What would be the intention of the Standard Web Information Aesthetic? i.e., would Brooks and USA Today have similar ambitions regarding the "readability" and "visual attractiveness" of their web pages? Do you think that Brooks would design a comfy page so that he could get you to think about comfy pages? But if he asks you a disturbing question about comfy pages, does that make a comfy page uncomfy?? Which is better? A comfy page about disturbing ideas, or a disturbing page about comfy ideas??? Would you want to read a comfy page about comfy ideas???? Could you read a disturbing page about disturbing ideas?????
Some Elements of the Standard Aesthetic
Strong North-West Corner Orientation
To discover whether the eyes themselves tend to follow a consistent pattern or whether they move at random without rhyme or reason has been the major objective in all of the research studies...The results of the study reveal that the median of the first fixation for all subjects falls at a point above and to the left of the center of the observed field. (p. 30 - 31)
The left side preference is most likely due to our habits or reading and a type of brain dominance. In reading a printed page, it is necessary for us to move to the left when beginning the first line as well as when returning to the next line of print. (p. 33)
When calculating the relative time spent in each of the four quarters of the field it is found that the percentage of time, 41%, is spent in the upper left-hand corner, 25% in the lower left, 20% in the upper right, and 14% in the lower right. (p. 35)
Brandt, Herman F. The Psychology of Seeing. The Philosophical Library, 1945
Frame Structure that Emphasizes North-West Corner Orientation
Are these semantically loaded left or right?
A Technology that Favors Looking not Reading
Reading from computer screens is about 25% slower than reading from paper.
Readers scan text and pick out keywords, sentences, and paragraphs of interest while skipping over those parts of the text they care less about.
On the Web, the inverted pyramid (i.e., state the conclusion first) becomes even more important since we know from several user studies that users don't scroll, so they will very frequently be left to read only the top part of an article.
useit.com: Jakob Nielsen's Website Jacob Nielsen is a major pioneer of Web writing and hypertext
Advocates and Examples of a Standard Information Aesthetic
"Most Web documents can be made to conform to The Chicago Manual of Style conventions for editorial style and text organization. Much of what an organization needs to know about creating clear, comprehensive, and consistent internal publishing standards is already available in such publishing guides as the Xerox Publishing Standards: A Manual of Style and Design. Don't get so lost in the novelty of Web pages that basic standards of editorial and graphic design are tossed aside."
Java Look and Feel Design Guidelines
The Java look and feel is the default interface for applications built with the JFC. Three distinctive visual elements are the hallmarks of the Java look and feel components: the flush 3D style, the drag texture, and the color model. The clean, modern appearance reduces the visual noise associated with beveled edges. A textured pattern, used throughout the Java look and feel, indicates items that users can drag. Such an indication cues cross-platform users in a reliable way.
"The controls that appear in Microsoft Windows XP have a new, futuristic look."
"By naming the new release Windows XP, Microsoft makes it clear that the main focus area for this product is the user’s eXPerience. The increased speed and efficiency of the operating system are further enhanced by the new visual design. Microsoft uses adjectives such as “fun”, “fresh” and “desirable” to describe the new look. And never before has the visual design of an operating system created such excitement. We believe that this is a design with staying power. "
DHTML Means That Web Pages Are Contingent ARTifacts
Not only are web pages works of art with identifiable aesthetics, they are also products of technologies that can respond to individual users. In short, their artfulness is customizable to each consumer's taste. Here are two technologies that support individualization:
Cookies
Cookies are small files of textual information, stored on the user's machine in a browser-dependent textual format. A server can interrogate a cookie before serving information to the client machine. Cookies are useful to save user preferences, to customize data, or to keep track of ordering items while a user browses. Cookies are used to give a personal touch to a web page by remembering the information the user gave at a previous visit.
Amazon cookies on my office machine, July 4, 2003
Site Skinning
Site Skinning: Rich XML Classes Let Users Personalize Their Visual Experience on Your ASP.NET Site. MSDN Magazine, March 2003
kinning refers to the ability to modify the GUI design of an application—wrapping it in another skin—without affecting its functionality. As popular as skinning is in the rich-client world, it has not made much of an impact on the Web client space even though it has a variety of benefits. For example, skinning your Web site can provide customization on a per-user basis. One of the reasons Web skinning has not become as popular as it could be is the lack of tools for creating skinned Web apps.
ASP.NET Web Forms are becoming a popular solution for delivering dynamic Web content. They are simply HTML template pages which are populated with dynamic data at request time.
Deeply Philosophical Question Dealing with Identity, Epistemology - and other polysyllabic "heavy" stuff
If web pages are contingent artifacts, does that mean that each of us is surfing our "own" web, i.e., if Amazon is storing cookies for me and customizes itself just for me (just as it customizes itself for you when you visit it), does that mean that each of us has our own "view" of Amazon? As time passes and more web sites are dynamically generated with site skins that react to my IP address and cookies, will the web evolve into "personal" spaces for each of us?
Woo, heavy stuff: everybody living in his or her own web world...what happened to "online community"?
Associated question: Will we all turn into Keanu Reeves in the Matrix?
Add a word to your vocabulary: EPISTEMOLOGY - the study or a theory of the nature and grounds of knowledge especially with reference to its limits and validity. Merriam-Webster Dictionary Online
Does Style Matter?
To claim that web style matters is to claim that anyone who creates a web page is an artist. Not so outlandish a claim if you consider that folk art is produced by artists "without formal training" (Columbia Encyclopedia) and the Grove Encyclopedia of Art defines outsider art as "outside the fine art tradition." Given that the vast majority of web pages are created by just plain folks (e.g.: you and me) who like to mess with technology, then the web is vast living museum of folk art (According to the opinion of T. Brooks).
Economic Consequences of Web StyleIf one is selling on the web, then branding, product identification, and "look" become very important. In fact, the image may be more the product than the product itself.
Example: Travel Web Sites
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Travel Web sites have turned into the Turkish bazaars of the Internet. Burdened as they are with catering to every possible taste in order to maximize revenue, they are frequently noisy and cluttered, shouting deals at visitors from every possible corner.
But there are oases. In some cases, they are modest electronic travel storefronts that one might ordinarily pass by, but that open onto an elegant and wonderfully user-friendly atmosphere. Most other times, though, these oases are found in hotel sites, especially those cutting-edge conceits built from the ground up to sell style. Here are a handful - belonging either to hotel chains or to companies that make hotel bookings - that are easy on the eye, if not the wallet. Bob Tedeschi, New York Times, November 24, 2002 |
"Unlike the Expedia-Travelocity-Orbitz e-travel agency triumvirate and its imitators, hotel sites do not have to try to appeal to the masses, so they can frequently take chances with their designs and include daring visual effects that would waste valuable real estate on the other sites. The Schrager hotels site is a prime example." Tedeschi
Aesthetic Challenge: One of these web sites has "daring visual effects that would waste valuable real estate" on other web sites. The other one uses the standard aesthetic to jam as much as possible onto its web page. Can you tell which one is daring and which is jammy?
Accessibility Consequences of Web Style
Style can have a big impact on the accessibility of web content. Ever try to read black text on a blue background? How about blue text on a black background?
Accessibility includes accommodation of users with different skills, knowledge, age, gender, disabilities, disabling conditions (mobility, sunlight, noise), literacy, culture, include, etc. It includes support of a broad range of hardware, software and network access. universal usability.org
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to see what Bobby thought of this web page
Is style the only thing that matters? Web Pages as Art
The web has provided an opportunity for artists and designers to explore new ways of presenting text and visual information.
The images to the left are screen shots of some of the Fresh Styles for Web Designers suggested by Curt Cloninger.
The Webby Awards
"Since its inception in 1996, The Webby Awards unwavering mission is to honor excellence. The annual Webby Awards ceremony serves as a snapshot in time of the state of the Internet, the industry, and the world."
Webby Criteria for Judging Web Sites 2003 Best of the Web Award Winners"Good content takes a stand. It has a voice, a point of view" "Sites with good structure and navigation are consistent, intuitive and transparent" "Visual design communicates a visual experience and may even take your breath away" "Good functionality means the site works well" "Interactivity insists that you participate, not spectate" "Overall experience includes the intangibles that make one stay or leave"
There are numerous examples of post-alphabetic, avant-garde design on the Web
Example: The arts collective Blast Theory
Blast Theory is one the leading artists' groups in Britain making interative performances, installations, video and mixed reality projects. Combining rigorous research and development with leading edge technologies, their practice ranges across media and disciplines, taking risks and encouraging critical debate.
Example: The Daily Report, a blog by Jeffrey Zeldman about web design. Externals, sites and stuff he likes
Example: Prix Ars Electronica - International Competition of Cyberarts 2003
Example: The Designer's Republic
Example: n3xt.com
Example: ndroid.com