Doing a lot with very little.
I suppose that it was quickly becoming obvious that the meat and potatoes basics
of text and photos on a web page wasn't satisfying for many of the people who
wanted a web presence. It might have been enough for me,
but there were others out there who were definitely trying to push the envelope
on design possibilities. One of my favorites of these was David Siegel's High
Five Awards. Every other week I'd click over to that site in order to see
what people with vision were envisioning.
And they were doing a lot. Not just with Flash (which never really attracted me)
but with layout, with color-schemes, with fonts, and in general with design. Sometimes
even the content of these sites was actually interesting, but (in this case at
least) that wasn't really the point. What was perhaps most impressive was the
fact that essentially from the same set of tools different designers were producing
sites that seemed to have almost nothing in common design-wise. As we surfed among
sites that were little more than Word documents with pictures interspersed here
and there, we'd find ourselves clicking on sites that made us stop and ask ourselves
"how did they do that?". And most impressive was the fact that that
that was always something different. The possibilities were vast. I was
even making some money for a while reporting on particularly impressive sites
in an online column I posted once every two weeks
to the site of an online community of long ago. As is to be expected, I learned
about some of the sites I mentioned via the High Five Awards site.
Go to: Templates from hell.