User:Kim/reading/The Webs Grain

Frank Chimero, 2015, https://frankchimero.com/blog/2015/the-webs-grain

some thoughts on the style of the text:
its very blog like, much and various media content (which I found annoying), no headlines or chapters, drawing arguments from various fields, starts his conclusions from the ground up

• begins with nostalgia (a strange opening, very striking, seeking for attention), then: things changed, stating his growing frustration and disappointment in tech and industry
• examines basic html structure - and challenges of responsive design (when you dont want page to be vertical)
• Bicycle Bear Websites Websites that do what they are not supposed to (going against their grain, their natural character) -- to what extend is that good or bad?

Every Material has a grain, including the web. [...] Too often the internet is cast as a wide-open, infinitely malleable material.

Web Interfaces

• brings some website interface design examples and reasons we use them
  • flat colors/ gradients: lightweight, CSS
  • horizontal stripes of content to level vertical bias
  • ambient background images allow for cropping to unknown sizes
  • mosaics present multitude of contents

We use text as interface, because the nuanced but significant differences in technology's abstractions are difficult to communicate visually.

• we share similar design solutions because we're using the same materials -- but still there is a creative industry that wants invention and one thing to be better than the other

What would happen if we stopped treating the web like a blank canvas to paint on, and instead like a material to build with?

David Hockney

• Hockney's 'The Scrabble Game' resemble designing for screen vs Mona Lisa stands for designing for print
• control vs discovery, uniformity vs multiplicity

challenges in web design:

an edgeless surface of unknown proportions comprised of small, individual, and variable elements from multiple vantages assembled into a readable whole that documents a moment

Flux and Edgelessness

• Chimero presentation "What screens want", what does it mean to natively design for screen?
• he says flux – the capacity for things to change. – designing for web = managing change over time
• and edgelessness – what I am not so sure about – there are edges we just dont often see them visually or get to those
  • I get his point of edgelessness as webs hypothetical structure (individual pages, linked), being able to branch out forever
  • however there are:
    • limits to server capacity (in some way physical edges)
    • enforced limits by politics (banning specific pages or keywords)
    • edges of language maybe (what is articulated but also in which language are websites written)
• Chimero then states that on a practical level, working on websites also brings forth edgelessness of disciplines - maybe ideally but were not there yet!

Edgelessness in Interface Design

• In web design we dont have a fixed container size (like the printed page) bc we dont know what device site will be viewed with
• so lets start with arrangements of content and then put them in different sized containers

Conclusion

• ends the text with call to be cautious of too much convenience (in digital tech) - it limits agency
• we cant solve problems caused by tech with just adding more tech
• make up your mind about: Whats technologies role in your life? And what do you want from it?