Week 1 - Fresh Styles Chapter 1

So this is going a bit faster than I'd expected, but I still have that long chapter of the Artist Class in my back pocket to take up my time.

I finished reading the intro to the book "Fresh Styles for Web Designers" by Curt Cloninger. His basic point with this book is that the internet, in general is really boring as of today and that corporate design has no excuse for making all their designs look the same, no matter the company, no matter the product. Here are a few of the points I found most interesting in the intro:

-"Most people still want the web to be print. But the web is not print. Nor is the web television. The web is it's own communications medium with its own media characteristics."

-Cloninger uses the book to cover 10 "fresh, underground web design styles." He will explain how they work, why they work and some of the technical tricks that make the styles possible.

-He claims that "Corporate web is largely bland, passionless, and unengaging." With excuses of things like "Clients will buy anything we tell them, so why bust our chops developing something innovative and unique? After all, it's just the web." He adds, "As the web matures, these excuses won't cut it anymore.

-"Above all, it takes a focused narrative voice--an angle, a plan, a consistent point of view--to unify a site's disparate elements and give it a cohesive personality.

-"Different jobs require different styles--hence the need for a broader, more diverse web design vocabulary.

-And the moral of the story? "The web is not a database. The web is a communication medium."

And onto chapter one of Embracing Your Potential by Terry Orlick, PhD.

Hopefully I can make it til Erik gets up. I'm fading faster than I'd thought I would. =S