34 WHY: Designing for the Medium: Instant Karma

INSTANT KARMA

If the invention of the printing press brought humanity out of the Dark Ages, the building of the Internet and the growth of the Web have ushered in a new information age. It’s an era where every voice can be heard and where truth can win out over lies—even when the liars have million dollar budgets. Say Detroit spews out a bad car (it happens) and decides to dump millions on advertising in the hope of selling it anyway. Message boards on the Web will quickly spread the word that the lemon gets five miles per gallon and spends more time in the shop than on the road. Angry owners may even start a protest site, garnering coverage in the traditional news media. The Web has changed the rules of the market. (See www.cluetrain.org for more on this.)

It also has changed publishing. Some of the Web’s best-loved authors have never written a traditional book. Others have gotten traditional book deals based on the popularity of their online publications.

The Web has launched careers, CDs, and movies and brought together the globally scattered members of countless unnamed tribes. You might be the only Sufi in Piggott, Arkansas, but you can find thousands of fellow believers online. If the other kids attending Fredericksburg High don’t share your passion for the music of Bernard Herrmann, you’ll find folks more in tune with your interests online.

Social commentators sometimes worry that the Web is making us more isolated. In the picture these pundits paint, tortured introverts peck out desperate messages in dark, lonely chat rooms. We take a different view. In ordinary life, extraordinary people often feel terribly isolated because no one around them can understand them other than superficially. The Net and the Web offer real hope and true companionship for those willing to express themselves and seek out like-minded souls. This, we think, is a good thing.

Taking Your Talent to the Web

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THE WHOLE WORLD IN YOUR HANDS

They don’t call it the World Wide Web for nothing. As individuals, we can not only email pen pals in Istanbul and Amsterdam, we can find out what people in those countries think by reading their personal sites or talking with them in online communities.

People living in nondemocratic nations can publish their protests anonymously without fear of government retaliation. In lands where all views are tolerated, everyone from amateur gemologists to alien conspiracy freaks can broadcast their theories to a global audience.

Free online services, such as Alta Vista’s Babelfish (babelfish.altavista.com) translate text on the Web into a variety of languages. These translations may be awkward and even hilarious—after all, translation is an art best practiced by human beings. But the gist of the text survives the translation. If you publish the story of your child’s first steps on your personal site, your tale may be accessible to families in Indonesia and Zimbabwe.

The Web not only reaches the world, it changes it. As a web designer, you will be an agent of change, which is a lot easier and much less dangerous than becoming an agent of the FBI. You’ll also sleep better, and you won’t have to wear a tie.

JUST DO IT: THE WEB AS HUMAN ACTIVITY

Unlike any other mass medium, the Web encourages human activity instead of passive consumption. This can have a transformative effect, as consumers become active participants, reinvent themselves as content producers, and launch political parties or small businesses without begging for third-party capital. Armed with nothing more than the Web, individuals or small groups can affect the way the world does business, call global attention to a regional injustice, or bring hope to a cancer patient (http:// vanderwoning.com/living/blog.html).

36 WHY: Designing for the Medium: The Viewer Rules

Visit a web community, and you’ll see people who used to channel-surf devoting their leisure hours to arguments, flirtations, and other classic forms of human interactivity. These communities can spill over from the virtual realm to the real world. The members of Redcricket, for example, visit each other’s cities (www.redcricket.com). The readers and writers of Fray (www.fray.org) hold live personal storytelling events each year. The members of Dreamless (www.dreamless.org) participate in collaborative design projects (www.kubrick.org) and hold noncommercial “underground” design festivals in cities such as London and New York.

THE VIEWER RULES

On the Web, the viewer is in control. She can alter the size of your typography. She can turn off images. She can turn off JavaScript. She can force all pages to display her choice of fonts and background colors. In advanced browsers such as Netscape 6 and IE5/Mac, she can even use her own style sheet to disable or interact with the one you’ve designed. For designers, this can be either a nightmare or a new way of thinking about design. The openminded may wish to read “A Dao of Web Design” for a positive approach to this aspect of the medium (www.alistapart.com/stories/dao/).

Designers can thwart the user’s power if they insist—with mixed results. For instance, to force the viewer to see what you want her to see, you can deliver body text in an image instead of typing it in HTML. This is a classic mistake of the novice web designer. Why is it so wrong? Let us count the ways:

1.If the viewer has turned off images in her browser, she cannot read what you (or your client) have to say.

2.She cannot copy and paste your text into an email message she’s sending to her family.

3.Search engines will not see the text because it is embedded in a graphic image, and as a result, fewer people will discover your page.

4.A near-sighted visitor might find it difficult or impossible to read your 9pt. Futura “graphic text.”