Design 2.0

There is a lot of buzz right now in the ad industry around Web 2.0. Many people give many different explanations for what Web 2.0 is but in a nutshell it is the next generation of highly interactive, video powered, audio pumped, super speed, and turbo charged websites. These websites engage the user, capture the audience and create an entire experience around the brand, product, service or message they represent. These sites are mainly developed using Flash and have robust back end systems that help them communicate and deliver vast amounts of information and control.

Let’s take a step back and look at some of the history behind where we are today.

Designers come from a humble background and a rich tradition that started off in the print world. Designers would draft everything by hand and deliver it to a printer who would then have to go through an exhausting process to set it up for print. I am way too young to know too much about this but I do remember when I first started my design career I had worked with some plate makers who did things like stripping and burning and all kinds of other things that I really didn’t understand, at that time I had been hearing them speak about new digital printing methods that would soon put them out of business. Less than a year later they no longer existed. Shortly after I had become well versed in Illustrator, Photoshop and Quark I soon learned that my passion for design was more geared towards the web. The web, literally in its infancy, offered me a new way to design. I wasn’t stuck to the constraints of print anymore and once I learned how to set up a server and figured out how to FTP using Adobe PageMill I was on my way?

As a designer just getting my feet wet in the mid 90s I was at a crossroads as to where to focus my attention. The web was emerging and although there were many doubters my heart and my soul told me that this internet was here to stay. I quickly learned how to make web pages, I learned the ins and outs of HTML and how to apply my designs to the web and the various nuances of web design. I read all kinds of books that really had no clue where the web was going at this point so I kind of filtered things out myself and felt my way around the darkness. I knew this was my calling and where I needed to be. Many of my friends and people I met who were also designers had no clue what to do, should they take a leap of faith and transition into the web or stay safe and continue designing for print?

We seem to be at another crossroad today. The web has expanded and become a world unto itself. I often times think of outer space, the deep sea and the internet, yes the internet as another realm so vast that when you think about it your head starts to hurt. It is a realm where the creative soul can unleash itself, a place where anything is possible and a place where ideas are infinite. Who ever guessed that us starving artists, struggling writers and creative geeks would one day have a place where we could live and play with every outrageous idea we have ever come up with? It gave birth to the Blogger, the Flasher, the Tweaker and the Seeker; it revealed a world that we only dreamed about. Not only was this a new world but also a giant canvas, a place to post all our designs, our photographs and our ideas, it gave us a home. I don’t know one artist that doesn’t see the web for what it truly is, amazing!

So now we seem to be embarking on a new kind of web, one that demands more interaction, more design, better video, clearer audio, more complex back ends and a level of entertainment that eclipses Television and radio. Designers are now challenged to meet the needs of the new web; our tool boxes no longer consist of Photoshop and Illustrator but now must have Flash, Dreamweaver, video compression tools and audio tools. Adobe gobbled up Macromedia because they knew that our tool box simply wasn’t enough for the next generation of design. A designer must now be able to make their art work come alive, to make it breathe and to make it flow or to pay someone else a lot of money to do it for them. A designer can no longer impress with a flat static comp that tells a story because the web demands that the story come alive, that it move and morph and twist and turn and open up video windows and audio players left and right. The public is now getting used to an interactive experience that has never before existed. Just today someone mentioned that the average number of seconds a person at The Louvre looks at a picture is 2! That is astonishing, 2 seconds for a work of art that took a lifetime to create.

Today’s designer must come to terms with the demands of the web, they must understand and appreciate the level of dedication it requires and they must prepare themselves properly to take on that level of dedication. The web has allowed so many more people to emerge from the farthest reaches of the globe and to express themselves in so many new and exciting ways. The web is massive and there is room for everyone. Those who will take the leap we took 10 years ago and add an interactive design class and a programming class to their major or take the time to learn it on their own will only benefit from the major improvements of the next generation of the web and will be better prepared to unleash their designs onto the world.