Discourse in web design An Essay by Jason Santa Maria v5.jasonsantamaria.com A website is its own, singular thing. We know it isn’t a book, a TV show, a film, or a song, but our language is limited to talking about it in those restrictive boxes. A website is a mix of all of those things, and none of those things. It is influenced by place and time. A website changes with age. It can evolve and regress. It was then I wondered if the problem wasn’t that web design lacked its own Emigré. What if we actually lacked a shared language to critically discuss web design? Art, architecture, and even graphic design, have critics and historians that give context to new work through the lenses of culture and important work from the past. wwwcritique
Having quite lost sight of the principle But the coppersmiths themselves, in their desire to do better or otherwise than their predecessors, soon quit the line of truth and propriety. There comes then a second coppersmith, who proposes to modify the form of the primitive vase in order to seduce the purchaser with the attraction of novelty...and it becomes fashionable, and everybody in town must have one of the vases made by the second coppersmith. A third, seeing the success of this expedient, goes still further, and makes a third vase, with rounder outlines, for anybody who will buy it. Having quite lost sight of the principle, he becomes capricious and fanciful...yet everyone applauds the new vase, and the third coppersmith is regarded as having singularly perfected his art, while in fact he has only robbed the original work of all its style, and produced an object which is really ugly and comparatively inconvenient. Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, Discourses on Architecture CamelsStyle consists in distinction of form fashionnovelty