bad design is good
after reading this excellent article on v-2, I’ve been thinking about “bad” design again. I have been watching and listening to the debate rage on within the usability community about how Flash is “99% bad” and it reminds me of nothing as much as the arguments I heard when desktop publishing came out. People were up in arms over how much bad design was showing up– these people don’t kern! They use matisse for body text! or something like that…. and of course desktop publishing was blamed for putting the power to design into unskilled hands. Eventually the revolution evolved, and bad designs continued to show up on lost dog posters, and good designs (or at least a typical level of mediocrity) on most professionally produced materials.
Flash is an accessible tool, and a lot of people are messing with it that have no clue what they are doing, and they are producing junk. So what. HTML is an accessible tool, and lots of people are producing junk (take a stroll through any geocities category.) So what. The revolution will produce failures and successes, but in the end we’ll have a better, livelier medium for it.