
Is modern web design too like print design? - blasdel
http://www.gyford.com/phil/writing/2009/12/02/design.php
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mechanical_fish
The essay leaves out "more clue" as a reason why web design has stopped being
clunky, unreadable Myspace-worthy technicolor evil and started to look like
something to read.

Typography is not a fashion statement. It serves an important functional
purpose. This writer actually holds up _Hotwired_ as an example of the sort of
"exciting" web design he misses. I beg to differ. The designers at _Wired_
single-handedly prevented me from finding out about Bruce Sterling for ten
years and more. Sterling wrote for _Wired_ , _Wired_ gave me headaches, ergo I
did not read Sterling. I figured, what could I be missing? Surely nobody who
actually knew much about words would exhibit them in this unreadable fashion.

What happened to the web is that it grew up, put the fluorescent crayons away
next to the blink tag, and realized that print designers had between five
hundred and a thousand years of practice in designing readable type and
layout, and perhaps this new medium should leverage that.

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tel
Maybe 10 years of new isn't enough to root out the real design advantages of
web in comparison to print. Maybe over the 800 years of print design we
learned a few things.

The web of today is exciting, but it's also useful and powerful.

Overestimating the future is a depressing business.

