I think you are dead on. Having been on both sides of this fence (I am now working hard to learn standards based design), I think I can figure out where the rift is.

The two groups come from different schools of thought, which are historically polarized: form and function.

One group thinks like artists: design is expression, a discipline which is exclusively under the umbrella of “art.” And like art, the primary purpose of good design is to produce emotion or reaction to it.

The other group thinks like engineers: design is a means to simplify or increase the enjoyment of an experience. The primary purpose revolves around the content that it serves, whether it is to make it more accessable, more digestable, or more comprehensive.

It can be argued that the best experiences come when both of these schools of thought are brought together, but I’m not so sure anymore. Is it really such a good idea, and is it even possible? Most of the time it seems a user is in the mood for exclusively one or the other. Sure, we can all cite examples of wonderful form and function, but in the end, it’s never a symbiotic relationship… one works for the other.

If I were to present a site like Flickr as a case study to one of my college “communication arts” teachers, they would scoff at its immature presentation and its boring layout. Where’s the style? Who’s voice is this? They would wonder what kind of fantastic work of art the website is about to turn your drab photo into, only to be let down. They don’t care about standards, code, and (when it really comes down to it) information. These are not things in their creative vocabulary, and they’re not, in their minds, what a designer ought to be concerned about.

Kadavy, as usual I agree with you about 75%. Splash pages, forced window sizes, rebuilding of navigation in flash, all bad stuff. I’ll even reluctantly go along with saying locking away of useful information in flash and graphic files is equally bad, because we’ve had that argument before, I’ll never win it, and I’m resigned to that.

CSS and Standards-Based Web Design, on the other hand, still seems to me to be — and excuse me for my clumsy analogy — akin to Betamax. Everyone agrees its better, hardly anyone uses it, and eventually, adapted only by a niche market, it dies. I learned on tables oh so many years ago when I was in college, and after using CSS you’ll get no argument from me that its better than tables. However, convincing someone its better and actually getting them to use it are quite different animals. I still use both, because it still seems to me, at least, that using CSS makes me feel too much like a programmer/engineer, and less like a designer. Dammit, I despise mathematics, and I’m not an engineer.

In all seriousness though, I’m sure my opinion will evolve as CSS development becomes easier to implement, as it already has somewhat over the past couple of years and will continue to become easier for non-programmers to handle.

Kadavy spontaneously combusts in 3…2…1

-t

“There seems to be a huge communication gap between “designers” that develop the type of interactive material that appears in the Communication Arts Interactive Annual, and “designers” that develop standards-based interactive material.”

I think there’s an even larger gap involved in those being selected as judges of interactive material and those deeply invested in the development of interactive material - I’m totally on-board with the thought that it’s likely many judges have a fairly print-based background and that they’re judging page layout vs. page function / implementation, but I also don’t know that most of CA’s readership is really going to be that jazzed by a competition which focuses as much on the coding / authoring of an interactive project as it does on the final visual appeal of the project. I also don’t know that the vast majority of those who are working with the web will ever have the experience or competency necessary to both look at AND author standards-based work, so it’s not extremely surprising that most are really going to judge on the basis of what a site looks and feels like not on its back-end structuring.

In the same way that I don’t think I would entirely want to know all the meticulous print-production details of winning entries (they’d frankly begin to feel even more like reading paper & printing swatch books than they already do), I can’t say that the majority of what’s really fairly outstanding standards-based web publishing is ultimately that much to look at (unfortunately, really - there are a few great examples beginning to crop up, but this is partially because we’re still carving the trails of what standards can really do).

Don’t mistake CA, Print, or How for anything besides what they are - the commercial look at design, not the technical examination of it. This will inevitably be left to publications that are far more focused on the continuing development of the web as a digital medium - I.D. might be more likely to focus on things like this, and frankly (I feel) has done this more consistently within their own interactive design reviews / annuals.

I also feel it completely undermines all of our activity as designers to insinuate that “Communication Arts” or communication design educators / practitioners are really not ultimately interested in information - what is our practice about if not to enhance the delivery of information? I won’t for a second argue that every one of us does this effectively every time, but communication / information-exchange is at the very root of what we seek to accomplish through the many varieties of design.

This whole argument simply demonstrates one of the underlying challenges of the web: the continuing quest for true standardization (a holy grail that we’re years away from - there has yet to be anything that has significantly solved the “too many cooks in the kitchen” problem of the wide-ranging levels of Internet technology, programming, and applications which continue to be spit out. There’s too much incentive for independent companies to continue publishing independent browsers and plug-ins that add further and further complexity to creating much of anything that answers to all standards.)

Without a more even playing field to adjudicate on, you’re never going to find these annuals covering anything but one vantage point on what’s noteworthy.

Paul, Your assessment of Print, CA, HOW etc. are accurate, and no, I don’t want to know every technical thing about how a print piece was produced. Web design is unique however, in that the technical details actually dictate how the piece functions in that very important mission of transferring information. Once something is printed – done – the technical minutiae have no bearing on whether someone will actually have that piece fall in their lap, or whether they will be able to read it. Two websites can look exactly the same, but the standards-based one will be found by more who seek the information on it, and will be useable by those with visual handicaps.

Overall, David, my biggest hope is something that seems well on its way to becoming a reality: that the Internet is going to reach the sophistication of almost all the other applications we use regularly on any CPU AND maintain the accessibility / searchability it currently sustains. In the pursuit of that, however, I am an extreme proponent of also developing the kind of visual sophistication that we’ve reached in print design within this medium alongside the navigational / structural sophistication that we’re beginning to see.

Particularly when I look at Google I always think “Couldn’t they have come up with a better-looking browser display?” - I know they often tout the aesthetic of their site as being “no frills” / information-prioritized, but it frankly looks like the beginning websites we saw 5-6 years ago. The informational access and retrieval is fantastic - no debate - and I know the back-end on Google is simply a wonder to behold. Just stick it into a clean CSS template and call it a day, okay?!

I also don’t think that the annuals are supposed to rate things like accessibility to the projects - there are often several of them that it’s very likely only a select group of people ever actually saw or utilized. It’s simply a group of judges responded to what they felt really turned their heads - not a rating of the base useability of the projects in question (although I guess you’d hope that navigation and flow were factored into the ones they selected).

I don’t know if it can ever be a full reality to have every corner of the Internet useable by every possible user - too many of the sites I’ve found which prescribe to these conventions seem to have become so overly basic as to seem at least unengaging and often somewhat obsolete (and suddenly I seem like I’m arguing against something like installing wheelchair ramps on a building because they just wouldn’t look that great!).

I’d just hope that more of the really good standards work continues to lean more towards BearSkinRug and Blogger than it does towards Google or Basecamp (I don’t necessarily want the entire Web to ultimately feel like the Windows interface or like window-based interfaces from the software applications we normally use). The Internet has the ability to be so much more than a simple informational appliance…

I understand where you are coming from but isn’t it called the “Interactive Annual” and not the “Web Design Annual”. The title makes me think that it would be geared more towards Flash and Director pieces rather than straight up websites.

“They rewarded weird, experimental work because they were bored with good work. They’d been around for decades, and had seen all the good work they cared to.”

Not hoping to take this thread this far off topic, but I can’t help biting on this comment:

And they might also have rewarded experimental work over competent, middle-ground work because it’s ultimately the work that will help to push their area of practice beyond its current confines. Constant training in what’s worked before often equals little more than stasis.

No debate over the need to educate competent practitioners in the basics and rigors of what they need to do - there are only so many years as an educator, however, where you want to ensure that you’ve produced a steady stream of “good” students without at least some of the exciting experience of also working with a student who’s pushed things exceptionally far on their own and might go three or four steps further because you’d urged them to.

So your saying you would rather not see innovation? It seems like the sites with flash content are pushing the “limits” of the web a little more than say…google. Sure they have the basics down, and the sight is easy to use, but its nothing special to look at nor interact with, and it certainly doesn’t catch my eye. It is the “interactive” annual after all…perhaps there should be two different web annuals.

just read daniels comment above … agreed good sir.

I agree with both sides. For the web, I’m tired of overly complicated Flash hoo-has that do nothing but make things tedious and hard to find more than once. But at the same time, “Interactive” doesn’t mean website, hell, it technically doesn’t even mean digital. I’ve designed a wedding invitation with Director that made people weep and I’ve designed websites with nothing but hand-coded text and a few GIFs that quickly and effeciently gave people exactly what they needed. Neither failed because of the medium, nor because one was lush and paced and the other was lean and immediate. They succeeded because of the choices and thought processes that respected the audience, the medium, and the purpose.

Also, their annual is entry-based. They judge what they get, for better or worse.

Though I agree that those of us with print backgrounds tend to have difficulty adjusting to some of the flex and scaling of the web. “Fixed width, fixed width!!”

Yes, of course I visited the sites and dug around in the code. Also, I am speaking of the web sites in the “interactive annual.”

I’d be hard-pressed to find anything that “pushes the limits of the web” more than Google Maps.

Those who question Google’s “visually stunning” status are correct, but I see Google as an historically significant design in that it has pushed the graphic component of advertising and branding towards obsolescence. There is a big difference between marketing to an audience browsing a store or having images fed to them on a TV screen and marketing to a user who is really looking for a specific thing. Every day, Google comes another step closer to transforming the web into mere streams of data being pulled into its website. It is the ultimate “communication” and I for one embrace this change.

I would rather see a Google-like site for the MoMA (with images included of course) than something in all Flash, because the valuable information in the latter site would be rendered unsearchable and unlinkable and thus it would transfer information poorly.

I think it is wrong to say that a standards compliant site can’t be a beautifully designed site worthy of recognition in an Interactive CA Annual. I think that it is also wrong to assume that “interactive” automatically means it has to be Flash driven. There isn’t a site that is more “interacted” with than Google. What could be more interactive than any site that gives you the information you need in a simple and elegant way? Why are the designs that gets recognized always provocative or edgy? Shouldn’t we be rewarding the sites that are finding the best way of communicating with their audience? It is still called COMMUNICATION Arts after all.

Mr. Nielson,

Yes, many flash based websites can be visially stunning. Some can be “easy” to navigate. The issue is that many of these flash based sites are only easy to navigate if you (1) have flash, and (2) have a fast computer. Many people still don’t have either. Of course, when it comes to a fast computer, I still think we’ve got a long way to go before we have one’s fast enough to deal with flash based sites. I have a 3Ghz Pentium 4 processor with 1G of RAM and DSL. Plenty of web surfing power, right? Well, as soon as get to an entirely flash based site, my computer fan goes crazy because my computer is thinking too hard. That’s just not acceptable for the web. I can’t imagine what a site like that would do to my mother’s computer. My rule of thumb is, if it’s making my fan run like crazy the whole time, don’t use the website unless you absolutely have to.

Also, using flash is not “pushing the limits”. It’s saying, “I want my website to be exaclty this way, so THERE!” Flash is the cop-out way to design a website. It’s like using Microsoft Word for typesetting. “I want to make this text italic. What? This font doesn’t have an italic version? That’s OK, Microsoft will do it for me anyways.” —-> “I want to make my menu items to jump out and bounce around when a user makes his selection. What? I can’t do that with XML/HTML/CSS? That’s OK, Flash will do it for my anyways.” Just because you can, and it might make it more visually interesting, doesn’t mean you should.

Personally, if I owned my own major company, I would pay big bucks to the designer/coder that could figure out how to make my site as visually stunning as all those flash sites, and yet stay standards compliant with easy compatibility on user computers.

I just can’t stay away from this thread - so much heat and furor being thrown around as well as so many broad predictions (greatly including my own).

You raise key issues related to non-searchable content within many of these sites - issues that are due in large part to simple ignorance on the part of Flash developers. In the midst of arguing for standards-based web design, we might also want to start arguing for standard-based web EDUCATION - does anyone have anything close to a core curriculum for a web-designer to be? I see hundreds of options for workshops related to specific web-development programs and programming languages, but it doesn’t seem like any computer science program does much more than chuckle at the idea of teaching web-development involving design and it’s clear that design programs can’t seem to get their act together and properly connect with CS to clear up major technical issues.

However, the new point I have to contend with, David, is:

“an historically significant design in that it has pushed the graphic component of advertising and branding towards obsolescence.”

Simple searchable data has successfully replaced marketing, advertising, and branding, eh?

So why is it, despite the fact that in the strictest sense of Google’s operations it will immediately pull up page after page of possible vendors for almost every product imaginable, there are still 50% or more of the vendors that Google offers me on a given search that I’ll outright rule out doing business with?

Price inflation? (Maybe) Lack of additional recommendations for a site found in searching? (A common-enough reason) OR Is it because there are so many sites that seem to lack even the most basic veneer of marketing savvy and professional-level visual styling?

Maybe it proves me entirely shallow, but a text-only site or a nearly styleless site both are general flags for lack of establishment and a sort of fly-by-night or at least a low-rent business. Branding and advertising of one sort or another are still managing to at least verify businesses that I might have happened upon initially via Google.

It boggles me to continue running up against the ploddingly early-web attitude that the Internet is a text-priority, pure information-only zone which should cater to the quickest possible delivery of the least designed content possible.

For exactly the same reasons and impulses which generated books to begin with (why bother with all those pesky illustrations and typesetting, after all - it’s only an excuse to stretch a manuscript into dozens more pages so that a book can sell for more, right?) the web by needs has to continue to become more accessibly design-related and design-friendly.

So many of us are clutching desperately to Flash because it is one of the very few intermediaries for a guaranteed adherence to the layout-as-intended approach we’ve been trained for. And frankly, if Flash-based sites are causing the fan to spin on a CPU it’s due to the same inexperience and lack of testing / optimizing that would cause any other web-media to fail or cause major system drain. Irresponsible media-management shouldn’t be blamed on the tool before it’s first blamed on the worker.

We’re all kidding ourselves when we assume that data-only will rule the day on the web - pull your brain out of 1996 and enjoy the imagery for a while.

“but I see Google as an historically significant design”

So perhaps it should have been in the interactive annual about ten years ago? (maybe it was, i’m a youngen’) But yes, for googles new feature (google maps), a gold medal, but not for their whole site.

to adelie: good point, but the target market is the design industry, not average consumers with slow connections…most of us have high speed now, right? I don’t think, soley for my entertainment :), that we as designers and thinkers should wait behind for the wounded who still have dail up. And yes, there are poorly made flash sites out there…i know. The “don’t have flash” argument doesn’t work though, it is FREE.

Here’s the main point that i’m trying to make: to me, the ca interactive annual is a publication for the design industry professionals to see what’s cutting edge and what to expect in the future. Every year people are going above and beyond what I ever could of imagined only a few years ago. I enjoy checking out res72.com whenever possible, it’s like an ongoing interactive annual…and the sites they post are usually different and have some sort of entertainment value that brings interest.

I do also think that the judges that ca picked sat and argued about this same stuff, and obviously you know which side they picked: Innovation, on sites that weren’t made forever ago.

If you actually believe that achieving validation is “icing,” then I’m going to state bluntly that I’m unclear why I bothered with this discussion.

Either way, I do tend to agree with what I see as your ultimate goal with this. But I think that your arguments are being muddled by assumptions about what these magazines either are or should be looking at, and what appears to be your own simple dislike of Flash, partially due to a certain amount of ignorance as to what it can really do. (Granted, that ignorance extends even to the lazy developers responsible for making people dislike Flash in the first place.)

If I were to entertain the notion that CA is intentionally avoiding entering the standards debate, I would have to first believe that they are even aware that they are avoiding it. They don’t even mention these issues in said publication.

I never said CA were intentionally avoiding, just that they(and the other mags) aren’t getting into it. I actually agree with you that they probably aren’t even aware of the matter. My point is that I don’t believe they should have to in the first place; it’s not important to their goals. It’s equally unimportant to most consumers. As long as the site works, they could care less whether it validates. If it does, that’s a good thing, but it’s not an absolute necessity.

If there are two web pages, and one is tables while the other is CSS, the latter one will perform better in search-engine rankings and therefore reach more of your audience. The scales will tilt even more if the former doesn’t use proper heading tags, and there will be no comparison if it chooses to hide its text in images without alt attributes.

There other possibilities. You’re picking and choosing attributes, then greatly exagerrating their importance. Ebay doesn’t validate, has loads of accessibility issues, is built with tables and without a single heading tag, and it’s ugly. Something must be working. It’s all those other—much more important—factors such as linkage from trusted sources that you’re not mentioning.

I have yet to see a real-world all-Flash site that employs all of these methods successfully

That sounds rather suspiciously like me pointing out above that none of your suggested winners validates. I’ll skip editing your quote to make the same statement about standards-based sites. The web is imperfect. The entire Net is built on the assumption that it’s always going to be just a little bit broken.

HTML/CSS/etc development practices are no more perfected than those for Flash. It’s all growing and changing, all the time, and it comes down to whether developers care enough to learn the new technologies and techniques and apply them. You may be interested in the current discussion about “the new professionalism.”

Paul,

I don’t have any problems with a text-only site, as long it is laid out clearly, and I don’t feel any designer should. However, I have my belief that ornament is a crutch leaned apon by those who haven’t bothered to learn that the space between elements is as important as the elements themself. This is, of course, off-topic.

Su,

I learned enough Flash and did enough development in it to believe that I know its limitations – that’s why I bother speaking about it – but you still haven’t presented (other than theories) anything to make me believe otherwise. Did you try my test above? I’d be interested to hear your take on that issue, since it is addresses the very core of this argument. Even if a site doesn’t validate, it will still reach a broader audience than an all-Flash site. The problems with the sites in the annual go way beyond a couple of URLs with ampersands in them. The sites do not function as information sources. I understand that sometimes that isn’t the purpose, but the MoMA example cannot be given that exception.

David, Equally off-topic, but I just can’t help taking a jab at your rebuttal: it’s also good to see that the Swiss school of design / International modernism hasn’t lost its stranglehold on your design sensibilities. Minimalism and beautiful use of white space are all well and good, but I also won’t acquiesce to a web run by those who’d rather take design back to Basel and make us all design like robots relying strictly on the geometry of a web table.