Making it hard

As someone who has decades of experience on the web, I hate to compare myself to the tortoise, but hey, if it fits, it fits. Let’s be more like that tortoise: diligent, direct, and purposeful. The web needs pockets of slowness and thoughtfulness as its reach and power continues to increase. What we depend upon must be properly built and intelligently formed. We need to create space for complexity’s important sibling: nuance. Spaces without nuance tend to gravitate towards stupidity. And as an American, I can tell you, there are no limits to the amount of damage that can be inflicted by that dangerous cocktail of fast-moving-stupid.

The web also needs diligent people so that the idea of what the web is and what it does remains legible to everyone. This applies to being able to read the systems and social environments the web creates so we know what’s real and what’s not, but the call for legibility should also humbly apply to writing legible code and designs systems that are easy for nearly anyone to interpret thanks to their elegance. That important work has a place, too.
Everything is Hard Again, by Frank Chimero

I got my start 22 years ago crafting together websites using simple bites of mark-up language, dollops of drop shadowed graphics, and later simple interactions, readable typography, and fluid layouts.

Welcome to my corner of the WWW


I’ve spent the last number of years far more focused on software, in roles more akin to user research than design, and as I plan a return to designing for the web sometime this summer, I am surprised at the complexity that confronts me. The similarities to developing for iOS are too striking. It feels like the days when I alone could deploy a website without the help of an engineer are gone. Or at least without the talents of said engineer. The consummate web designer must be rarer professional today than in the past (does the title even exist any more?). I thought a self initiated project would suffice to bring me up to speed, with maybe time for a short course on PHP, but to my surprise I may need to devote serious effort to just creating what I thought would be far more straight forward by now. To manage this complexity I’ll likely follow a path similar to Frank Chimero and forget the dazzle dazzle and just focus on clean simple communication.