Chapter XII The Graffiti Problem
Today I was checking out an old reading list and ran across Jason Santa Maria's Pastry ( it's rally good you should totally read it ) it's based around a question asked in 2007.
Back in 2007, Speak Up—the web’s town hall for graphic design—asked where were the landmark achievements in web design. Where were web’s design equivalents to Milton Glaser’s Dylan poster, Paula Scher’s Public Theater work, or Massimo Vignelli’s New York subway map?
I had never gave much thought to this question, not until I read it there and was staring right back to my face, it's a hard question because there really are landmarks, turning points and game changers on the web design history, Jason names a few and we all know them however the answer as to why aren't there really recognized as such is at best, complicated, he goes on and suggest that the main problem might be that we lack the correct language to critically discus web designs and while I subscribe to this idea I think there's another principle that needs to be understand when answering this question. I call this, The Graffiti Problem ( stay with me on this one, I know you don't like comparing web design to graffiti but I'm trying to make a point, I was thinking about calling it "the expiration date phenom" but it sounded a whole lot like a Big Bang Theory episode).
I believe the other problem we face is... Time. What do all the work mentioned before has in common? There has been enough time for us, to assimilate it and respect it and name them landmarks in design. Massimo Vignelli's work has been studied and showcased through time and we can still experience it on it's intended medium, however Bowman’s WIRED.com website has change, there is no way to experience it as it was and this is where the graffiti problem turns up. Like grafitti, websites tend to be "buffed" over or disappear into oblivion a redesign or a total shut down from the site often happens and then the work, bad or good, done on it is lost, no matter if it was Dondi himself who pained it or some supercool designer who painstakingly worked on the website. All we got left on both cases is photos or screenshots of them and no way to experience it in its original form.
There's not enough for them to be assimilated, studied and passed on the next generation, sure we have all heard about WIRED.com but for us that where not around when it first transformed web design and now having no way to interact with it but on blog post and screenshots... No way to experience it's magic, no MOMA to go to and look at the painting and experience it... I believe the problem is that web design is not timeless.
Perhaps we can find a way to solve this problem and along with Jason's suggestion we might find a solution to this "problem" and give an afterlife to our amazing work on the web.