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I've been forced to focus on the essence of delivering a communication, rather than looking for the next set of "cool" frills. Oh, I started out wanting to do really cool things. But the more I learned, the more I was thwarted. There was nothing left but to learn how to really deliver a message.
Other media do not have this problem very much - print designers can pretty much run amok if they want to. And what do we have? Lots of empty, non-productive advertising. This is the kind of stuff that looks cool, absolutely, but it mostly just drains away company funds.
And broadcast isn't much better, especially TV. How many times have you remembered a cool, clever ad -- but had no idea about what they were selling? Or listened to the measured cadence of a news reporter's voice, only to realize that they said absolutely nothing that was truly informative?
I'm very excited about my growth in communication skills. Occasionally I write some print copy or design a poster or a bit of direct mail. And, because of my web disciplines, I always build in a way to measure the response. An ad whose results can't be measured seems like a piece of evil to me these days.
The results I've seen recently show me that I've grown -- that I understand more about how to get a response from an audience, and even know more about how to find a target audience.
And I owe it all to lousy browsers.
The results I've seen recently show me that I've grown -- that I understand more about how to get a response from an audience, and even know more about how to find a target audience.
Feel free to speak out how you do this.
I have been in the same situation as you, oh i loved to watch the pages that got awards from different pages handling design awards, and i still like it, but i have learned since a while back that, you can have the collest design ever, and still make $0
I think this is one of the things where the Offline Marketing world, and the Online Marketing World met more and more, and sometimes Online marketing agencys hire Offline marketing Agencys just to learn how they promote the content better, and give the user a better view of what they are doing.
One thing though...
Other media do not have this problem very much - print designers can pretty much run amok if they want to. And what do we have? Lots of empty, non-productive advertising.
Yes and no. You seem to be talking exclusively about print advertising. I'm really 95% a print person, but I do academic books and in fact what people mostly strive for is a neat, clean, easy-to-use, no-frills, very readable end product. Clean fonts, simple layout, good index, logical table of contents. 500 years of collective experience with print means that for stuff that's really meant to convey information, there is little fol-de-rol.
I think that the usability standard for books is so far beyond the "I *can* add this cool gizmo so I *will* add this cool gizmo" in the web world. Frankly, in print, nobody would put the index in the middle of the book, but things just as stupid as that are done every day on web sites.
That's the main reason I still like print - nothing things beats it for conveying text and still images. Colored liquid on dead trees rocks!
Tom
Colored liquid on dead trees rocks!
Oh yeah - nothing like a really well done book. I own one beauty called "The Elements of Typographic Style" and another that is an "Illuminated" version of the poet Rumi. My criticisms were meant to address print advertising.
However, the art of book indexing can also leave a lot to be desired at times. I own some reference works that make me look around in hope that the book has a search engine!
Feel free to speak out how you do this.
That's the beauty of it - it's an art that grows as you practice it. I can talk about what I do, and you can talk about what you do, but there's an essence to the art that only gets developed with practice.
And that practice was forced on me when I realized that my browser toys were broken beyond repair for all practical purposes, and that they would be broken for the forseeable future.
I'm beginning to think you can tell how incompetent (lets say "inexperienced" to be nice) a developer is by the number of extra toys they try to wrap into a website.
I look to see how simple I can make each site - partly because I'm lazy on the maintenance end, and partly because many online users are VERY new and we're all using a very young and immature medium.
