Why there are no legendary web designers

My friend Jin has a theory:

Here’s my theory:

The web is a low resolution, low fidelity, crappy medium.

A quick gut check: Would you ever hang a web design on your wall?

A legendary work must transcend time, place, purpose, and even its own medium to become a work of art. Think Japanese swords, 1960s Mustangs, and almost anything by Jonathan Ive or Paul Rand.

It’s hard for any web design to be transcendent because:

  • The web isn’t tangible. It’s not even tactile; your hands are abstracted through a mouse and keyboard. You can’t smell or taste a website. You can’t see a website play a live gig.
  • The web makes everything ugly. It’s almost 2010, and web typography is still hopelessly broken. Browser windows are ugly. Operating systems are ugly.
  • Web design has little value in itself. Web design is just a container and delivery mechanism for ideas and information we do care about. Web design is the scaffold, not the cathedral.
  • The web is a solitary experience. It’s not fun or useful to watch someone else using it. Now, watch someone swing a hammer or sing a song, and the crucial “learn by imitating” center of your brain lights up.

It’s worth noting that video games can and do transcend their medium to become art, even though many legendary games were made and played on machines primitive by today’s standards. There must be something special about the immersive nature of video games, some magic in that they are “played” instead of “used”.

So, what to do? Keep on trucking. Embrace the web’s strength as a disruptive, world changing technology. We can figure out the transcendent stuff later.

December 22, 2009 / Category: UX Theory

  • jones19876
    Here's a thought: the web isn't art. It's not supposed to look beautiful, it's meant to be functional.

    Case in point, graphic designers are actually ruining the web desperately trying to make it beautiful.
  • Functional things can and should be beautiful. High end chef knives, motocycles, helicopters, bulldozers, they all do real work.

    I agree that designers *decorating* the web is no good, but baked-in transcendent design is hard because the web is so low resolution.
  • I like the self-deprecation here. It feels honest. As a programmer, I feel the same way about my "medium" which is business programming. We programmers talk a lot about "modeling the world" but really, in the end, our jobs largely boil down to simulating paperwork. And how could it be any different, when business has existed in its current form for a thousand years? We're not creating new solutions, just speeding up old ones.

    In the same way, think about what most websites are simulating. Brochures. Order forms. Catalogues. Posters. Newspapers. Apart from the rare poster artist (Talouse Latrec) none of these pre-computing artifacts were "transcendant art". Given the constraints you mention (e.g. low resolution) it would be remarkable if they would become transcendant under heavier constraint (although that's kind of a cool idea, that only through deprivation do we transcend. And of course for web design the primary deprivation is IE :).

    There is art in the web, though. It has exposed a great deal of latent talent in photography, illustration, and game design. Blogspot, Flickr, Deviant Art and Kongregate show us what amazing talent is out there. But the sites themselves are indeed just ad hoc user interfaces that serve largely to get the precious data from point a to point b.
  • Exactly. The web is a great for delivery, not so great for being engaging in itself.

    Great point about "simulating paperwork". Doing more than that is a good gut check for "working on stuff that matters".
  • Couldn't disagree more. There are plenty of web designs that I would project onto my wall (or maybe display in a digital frame)--printing them would be impractical because of the low resolution you have at the center of your argument. Also, those sites I would choose to use as art would not be the content-centric ones you mention (although there are some that make the aesthetics of text true art). If all you think of when you think of the web is TechCrunch and CNN then no, certainly not. But there are some amazing artists doing work designed and delivered on the web. Similarly, there are some very famous artists who used low-fidelity technologies centrally in their art.

    Your other arguments fall apart equally as fast -- looking at a painting is a solitary experience abstracted from our sense of touch and smell, and yet the visual arts is one of our primary artistic forms.

    Also, it's 2010! If you are bashing the web based on bandwidth and screen resolution, where were you in 2000, or 1995?
  • I hear you, but I maintain that the web is a crummy medium.

    What websites would you put on your wall? I draw a distinction between illustrations or video on a website and "web design".

    In art museums I can smell the art, see the texture of brushstrokes, and always co-experiencing the art with other visitors. Most important is that you can see a Picasso from across the room when you enter, and walk closer to it, essentially zooming in until you're not looking at composition but brushtrokes and paint texture. It's a "quality is fractal" kind of thing that websites don't have.

    What's interesting about the iPhone is that it approximates that zoom and is more tactile thanks to the touchscreen.
  • I would start the rabbit hole at:
    http://www.rhizome.org/
    http://www.designgraphik.com/
    http://turbulence.org/
    http://www.joshuadavis.com/
    http://www.markamerika.com/
    http://www.number27.org/

    ...some of these might not apply under your definition of web design, but certainly the idea of hypertext (just googling for hypertext works also opens up an entire world of literary works best delivered over the web) and the other tools available to us on the web cannot be ignored as potential tools of artistic trade...
  • Great post, Nathan. Only thing I would add to that is that legendary design can also have a lot to do with usefulness and simplicity. Take the post-it note. It's no 1960 Mustang, but it is simple and damned useful. In a lot of ways, the post-it is a work of art unto itself.

    So maybe there's something in that...if a web designer creates something shockingly simple and yet amazingly useful, life-changingly useful...is that legendary even if low-res?
  • Great example Adam, thanks.

    I'd say Post-its are legendary. You could certainly make art from Post-its (pixel art, origami, tiny drawings, etc.)

    There's plenty of low-fi art, like grunge, punk, doodles, street art, tribal art, etc. I think the difference is in the quality or resolution of the signal.

    Johnny Cash's music is simple in execution and production, and he couldn't really hold a tune, but his music is still great. However, put his music in an overcompressed mp3, and it dies. I think that's what I'm getting at. The web is a lossy medium because it's low res and lacks texture.
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