Notes

It's All About the Mix

Having just completed an Opinion piece for .net magazine on ‘Crafting Web Design Education’ (and currently crafting our next semester’s lecture programme), we’re looking forward to taking part in next week’s Web Teaching Day in Manchester.

With Andy Clarke and Chris Mills - and a host of others - on the bill, it looks set to be a great day. (Did we mention it’s free?)

If you’re involved in web design education or active in our industry and want to improve the state of web design education you should make every effort to attend.

Organised by Richard Eskins, Senior Lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University’s Department of Information and Communications, the day is a great opportunity for everyone involved in our industry to get together, share experiences and best practices, and help move our industry forward.

Our presentation, ‘It’s All About the Mix’, will look at ways in which we might improve web design education by practicing what we preach: embracing the tools we teach to develop a rich and varied range of learning materials, delivered in a variety of media, to ensure a dynamic learning environment; using agile methods to ensure course content is kept up-to-date; and fostering partnerships between academia and industry to deliver best practice teaching that’s tailored to today’s web.

There are still places left, you should sign up now.

1283405400 · Christopher Murphy · Follow Us on Twitter

P Is For Petri Dish

Another inventive, and very lovely, Daily Drop Cap courtesy of Ms Hische: “P is for petri dish.”

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Quipsologies Redesigns

Quipsologies (“It’s like Coudal Partners except without the links to Stanley Kubrick.”) gets an elegant, minimal, colour-coded redesign.

1283399940 · Christopher Murphy · Follow Us on Twitter

The Web is Dead?

Yesterday, Wired caused much ruckus on the intertubes with their article entitled The Web is Dead. Long Live the Internet, where the main argument goes as follows:

Two decades after its birth, the World Wide Web is in decline, as simpler, sleeker services — think apps — are less about the searching and more about the getting.

Arguing that companies seeking return on their investments are abandoning the web for more profitable pastures, the article has some interesting points and is well worth reading. Although the sentiment and conclusions can, and have been argued, the idea that the (free) web’s dominance is challenged is worth reflecting on.

Later in the day, BoingBoing rebutted with a modified graph, showing the “decline” of the web with the growth of traffic taken into account. By counting the explosive growth of traffic on the internet, the web no longer seems in decline, but rather joined by an even more explosive growth in high-bandwidth services like file-sharing and video.

Wired has clearly picked a sensationalist headline for their cover feature, but in the same issue, Tim O’Reilly and John Battelle debates whether The Web Is Dead, and Evan Hansen discusses How the Web Wins.

In all, an interesting debate — when you go beyond the stirring headline.

1282150080 · Nicklas Persson · Follow Us on Twitter

Devour

Lovely. Words on Devour:

Light as a feather, come on… Light as a feather.

Let there be light!

1281664320 · Christopher Murphy · Follow Us on Twitter

Teaching the Internets

As dyed-in-the-wool-tweed educators it’s no surprise to discover that we’re committed to events that help move the state of web design education forward.

We first spoke about the possibility of running just such an event with Andy Budd at last year’s Build Conference after party. Mr Budd went on to write up some thoughts on The Sorry State of Web Design Education (a great piece that kicked off some interesting discussion) and, admirably picking up the baton, Richard Eskins, Senior Lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University’s Department of Information and Communications, put the wheels in motion and organised a Web Teaching Day.

We’re delighted to have been invited to speak at the event and will be joining a host of respected speakers, including Chris Mills, the gentleman behind Opera’s Web Standards Curriculum and Andy Clarke, the gentleman behind Looking for Yogi.

With speakers from both education and industry backgrounds it looks set to be a great day to share examples of best practice and help shape a vision for web design education moving forward. Better still, it’s free and you can even win some schwag - a copy of Adobe Creative Suite 5 - courtesy of Adobe.

We hope to see you there.

1281636900 · Christopher Murphy · Follow Us on Twitter

The Incident

Instead of writing notes for this very publication, we’ve squandered the last few days in the illustrious company of The Incident, a retro-themed action game for the iPhone and iPad, which comes complete with a glorious chip-tune soundtrack and a variety of wonderfully obscure falling objects rendered with pixel perfection which lead to inevitable certain death if not avoided.

The artwork, by the very talented Mr Mrgan of Panic fame, also comes as free downloadable wallpapers to adorn your desktop which is nice.

1281622140 · Nicklas Persson · Follow Us on Twitter

QWERTY Won The Format War

For those of us blessed with the BBC iPlayer, there’s a chance to catch the always excellent Stephen Fry lament the rise of the QWERTY keyboard over other, more sophisticated, input methods, like the alternative keyboard layout of the sadly misunderstood Mr. Dvorak.

If you can’t access the iPlayer the BBC provides a short summary:

Just as AC beat DC, the audio cassette beat 8-track and VHS beat Betamax, QWERTY won the format war.

An interesting story, and even if you’ve heard it before, Mr. Fry is always an aural delight.

1281620040 · Nicklas Persson · Follow Us on Twitter

Blink

You have to feel for Louis J Montulli II (The Netscape Guy). His illustrious career has included no shortage of considerable achievements, not least being widely credited as the inventor of the <blink> tag (though truth be told, he only suggested the idea).

In 1991, while at university, he wrote a program that would eventually become known as Lynx (a milestone and one of the first web browsers). Whilst working on this he was heavily involved in the development of HTTP and HTML, a time he reflects upon as follows:

That time period was one of most exciting and fast paced periods I can remember. Innovations that are completely ubiquitous now were proposed and implemented in incredibly fast cycles. It wasn’t until the later days at Netscape that we coined the term internet time.

In 1994, Montulli moved to California to become one of the founding engineers at Mosaic Communications Corporation, creators of Mosaic - the web browser widely credited with popularising the world wide web. Mosaic, which later changed its name to Netscape, was a hotbed of activity, innovating relentlessly. Whilst there Montulli reflects that he was, “largely to blame for several innovations on the web including cookies and the blink tag….” His list of achievements goes on…

His reflections on The Origins of the Blink Tag, though not recently published, are fascinating reading and well worth a few moments, to either: wander down memory lane, or gain some insight into how things were in ‘the good old days’ when the web we know was being born. Montulli states:

For those of you who are relatively new to the Web, the <blink> tag … causes text to blink, and many, many people find its behavior to be extremely annoying. I won’t deny the invention, but there is a bit more to the story than is widely known.

Reminiscing, Montulli casts his mind back to a fateful day in 1994 bearing all the hallmarks of a spot of creative inspiration: a bar in Mountain View, California; a 30 foot tall statue of Wonder Woman; a “fair amount of drinking”; meeting a girl (who would later become Montulli’s first wife); and, of course, a great deal of laughter at the thought of blinking text and “blinking this and that” and how absurd this might be.

The rest, as they say, is history. A “pretty harmless easter egg” turned out to be “a lot like Las Vegas” except on Montulli’s - and everyone’s - screen.

Spare a thought for Montulli, who writes:

The <blink> tag will probably be remembered as the most hated of all HTML tags. I would like to publicly state that at no time did I actually write code or even seriously advocate for the <blink> tag. It is true that I put forth the initial inspiration, but it really was merely a thought experiment.

A gentleman to the end, he refuses to name the names of those who undertook the dastardly deed, and reserves his sympathy for his humble Lynx browser which - ironically - never did get to blink.

1281120120 · Christopher Murphy · Follow Us on Twitter

About Pitches

Erik Spiekermann about pitches:

Our strategic and creative resources are our most valuable assets. We cannot afford to give them away for free.

What we do offer for free to potential clients is a strategic analysis and a creative debrief, as shown in this illustration.

Perfectly put. The guidelines, neatly summarised in a diagram, encapsulate the process clearly.

1281115740 · Christopher Murphy · Follow Us on Twitter

The Periodical

The most recent entries in the Periodical and Reviews sections:

• Jessica Hische is an illustrator, typographer and designer living in Brooklyn, New York. We asked Ms Hische a dozen questions…
• Whilst it's encouraging to see Apple throwing its considerable weight behind HTML5 and the development of open web standards, it's unveiling late last week of an HTML5 Showcase was, to put it mildly, somewhat disingenuous…
• Simon Collison is a designer, speaker, author and bon viveur with a passion for Victoriana and assorted miscellany. We asked Mr Collison a dozen questions…

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HTML and CSS Web Standards Solutions

Learn how to build hand-crafted web pages using well-structured XHTML and lean and efficient CSS. By embracing a web standards approach, HTML and CSS Web Standards Solutions enables you to create web sites that not only look great in all modern browsers, but are also accessible to a wide variety of audiences across a range of platforms - from those browsing on everyday computers, to those accessing the web on the latest, emerging mobile devices.

Get it at Amazon.

The Authors

In addition to their role as lecturers in interactive design at the University of Ulster at Belfast, where they have been active in promoting a web standards-based curriculum, Christopher Murphy and Nicklas Persson are practicing designers and digital artists. Their work has featured in a variety of design books and magazines alongside numerous internationally respected designers and they are regular speakers at design conferences and workshops worldwide.

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