return of the webmaster
Was flipping throughThe Art & Science of Web Design again, and a couple things hit me.
One: Jeff is so very right about things that I hold deeply true and have never been successful in convincing folks I work with, including the superiority of liquid design, the inevitability that pages will never look how you designed them, that speed is paramount and pages should be designed to load gradually and that text should be in html, pictures in graphics.
Now I am just praying this becomes everyone’s bible, and these debates I still have will stop happening.
Two. Jeff Veen is the last of the webmasters. The webmaster was the guy back in the beginning of the web who knew a little about everything and could put out a site site from design to writing of the copy to html and graphics crunching. Then the webmaster lost writing and design, then engineering took over the coding (which ended up being so much more than html) and pretty soon the webmaster had dissolved into other jobs. In many ways this is a good thing. The great loss is there is no person who really holds all these pieces in his/her head. Producers and information architects are two “generalists” who have stepped up into aspects of this role, though neither of them holds the geeky piece that no one seems to properly value. How can you create without understanding the nature of your medium? Jeff’s book shows the value of understanding the big picture.