Web as the Medium
Last week, a coworker and I were looking at entering Kittelson’s recent advertising landing pages for the Webby Awards. We began by looking at the previous years’ winners in the professional services category, of which we’d be entering under as an civil engineering consulting firm. The results? Well, here’s a screenshot:
The 2007 winner is an over-engineered, inaccessible flash abomination, chock full of animations and video clips, superfluous movement, and music. It’s fantastic for what it is—a movie showing high-end flash development that looks beautiful in a screenshot, but for a professional services firm? This is when I realized that there’s no point in entering the Webbys.
Web Design Isn’t Graphic Design—Does David Bowie Know That?
The Webby Awards are judged by an illustrious crowd of political columnists, singers, musicians, and personalities, including David Bowie and Beck. It should come as no surprise then that sites like the one above win; people outside of this industry view web design just like graphic design—taken at face value for aesthetic purposes.
This struck my coworker and me as very broken, and it appears that Jeffrey Zeldman in A List Apart’s most recent issue agrees:
It’s hard to understand web design when you don’t understand the web. And it’s hard to understand the web when those who are paid to explain it either don’t get it themselves, or are obliged for commercial reasons to suppress some of what they know, emphasizing the Barnumesque over the brilliant.
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The winning sites look fabulous as screen shots in glossy design annuals. When the winners become judges, they reward work like their own. Thus sites that behave like TV and look good between covers continue to be created, and a generation of clients and art directors thinks that stuff is the cream of web design.
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The trouble is, web design, although it employs elements of graphic design and illustration, does not map to them. If one must compare the web to other media, typography would be a better choice. For a web design, like a typeface, is an environment for someone else’s expression.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t believe my work deserves to win, but it’s rather disheartening knowing the biggest and most well-known award in the web industry is missing the mark almost entirely. Outside of some special categories—notably, Best Visual Design - Function and Best Practices (Both of which, by the way, went to Flickr)—the vast majority of all winning sites were flash-based.
Is that really where the internet is headed?
