A Handcrafted Web
by
Tagged
It has been a long battle but, for the second time in five years, I've re-subscribed to the Sunday print edition of the NYTimes. I caved because of the magazine. I love the magazine and as much as I've tried reading the articles from it online, it is not the same. What I get when I flip through its pages is the feeling I get when I watch a great film. Someone put thought and care into the whole experience. Every dot on the page is used to convey something emotional about the story. The flow is arresting and artistically subtle. It reeks of craft.
Go Slower
The web is the most advanced publishing system we've ever had but the process in which most people publish is backwards next to print. On the web, your design is set before you figure out what you want to say. This is true for the publishing they do at nytimes.com with their article template and it is true for the publishing you do when you type "happpppy birthday. I luv you" on the facebook page of a good friend. In print, every fiber of the page is yours to define, and on the web, the page belongs to Mark Zuckerberg or whoever coded your template. You express yourself on the web by filling out text forms. Another way is possible.
We don't need more tools to make publishing faster. I can check in on foursquare with two taps of my thumb and it automatically generates a full sentence that’s streamed to my twitter. I can reblog a gif with a line of commentary on my tumblr while I'm waiting in line for a sandwich. What is scarce on the web are human-made, intentionally thought-out experiences. My stream is a rush of links all competing for my attention, and for most of them, I know what they’ll look like before I even click.
My film professor often used the phrase “go slower” in class to teach us how to make a cinematic experience. It’s the individual moments of a movie that sear into your memory and becoming a good filmmaker is about learning what is really required to achieve them. Grabbing the attention of a bored audience, even when they’re sitting in a dark movie theater with nothing else to look at, takes work, grabbing the attention of someone at work scanning a thousand messages a day takes even more.
Film and print are mediums that have had a lot of time to develop and we’ve come up with a rich language to talk about how to make them compelling. The web is just starting to find that language and it will be pushed forward, one page at a time.
Yet the challenge with doing it one page at a time, is time. Hand coding custom html/css for individual pages is not realistic for most and there needs to be a lighter way to experiment. We've spent the past year building that. A way for those telling stories on the web to get control over the page so they can make what only they can imagine.
The Page is Yours
make it
beautiful
Make it Meaningful
for at least one person
