Giantpaper.org

While searching for a WPR for Giantpaper, I came across Captious Pedants (a site I remember Jem saying some good things about). What I really like about them is that they don’t use the rating system (3 stars out of 5, etc). I know the system sum’s up the reviewer’s view of the site, but I think the reviewee has a good enough idea of what the reviewer thought by reading the summary or just by going through the review itself and reading what needs to be fixed. Besides, if a reviewee saw that they got a 1 out of 5 (and according to the rubric, which might equal “WTF? Why submit your site in the first place??”), they might think ‘Oh, so this person thinks my site sucks.’ And if they’re like me five years ago*, they might be crushed to receive such a rating (even if the reviewer didn’t mean for that to happen). And reviewers should encourage their reviewees, not discourage them. So I was quite happy to see that this WPR doesn’t use this system.

*Yes, when I was eighteen. I was really sensitive back then.

When I came across their review for Remidica, where in the first several paragraphs, where the reviewer Veve, saw that the website owner believed web design to be art (owner’s blurb on this is further down the page, under “Geisha”). Basically, Veve’s response was that web design is not art, since while it may be visually appealing, other things like functionality need to be taken into consideration.

As an art major whose goal is to become a professional web designer I find that very interesting. The reason why I’m majoring in Art and not Multimedia, is that at my uni, there is no Multimedia major. It’s categorized under Art (along with Graphic Design–we have a small university, see). But in a way, web design and graphic design–both design fields are related to art (or are a branch of art, as Veve suggested). How? As Veve said:

We can’t put our hats on Bernini’s David and complain it’s a bad hat rack when it falls off because it was not designed to be a piece of furniture. On the other hand, it’s art. We derive a certain pleasure from its visual presence, but there is no tangible use in it. While a Web layout may be visually appealing, it needs to accomplish a few things–mainly, it needs to present your content. If we generalize it to art, certain people, like you, would ignore critical aspects of web design. Functionality, for example.

But art can be functional. For example, aren’t most ceramic containers made to hold something like water? And Wikipedia lists jewelry as a form of art (as a sculpture), and they’re made to be worn by someone in some way. Don’t tell me that’s not functional.

Besides that, art has changed over time, and is no longer restricted to paintings, sculptures of people, or pottery. Example? The Weisman Art Collection is a huge art collection once owned by this guy named Fredrick R. Weisman. Nearly half of the items of in his house are functional (chairs; tables; fountains; a mailbox in front of the house, which is a sculpture of a giant hand holding the mailbox, etc). For our uni’s Student Art Sale last semester, one guy entered in some surfboards he painted. Another student made a sculpture, consisting of a light bulb attached inside a metal cage-like structure. When the bulb is turned on in a dark room, the light casts casts some interesting shadows on the walls through the crisscrossing of the thin metal bars (and what function does that have? Well, it lights up the room. :P).

Heck, last spring, my previous Web Design teacher entered in a bunch of our final projects from our 324 class (which were just our portfolios, all in HTML, CSS and JavaScript—mine was one of them :3*). The teacher also told us that there are other art exhibits where web designers’ Flash portfolios would be on display.

*Of course, since I had chosen to use the CSS background property to display the layout images, instead of the <img> tag, my header image didn’t show up on the browser they were using to display the sites with: IE 5.23/Mac. ::gag::

(Despite what it may seem like, we did learn how to be practical in both classes for Web Design and Flash. Ex. for one of our Flash projects, the teacher said if we’re going to include music in the background, we should also have a stop button, so users could turn it off. And for our final project, we should have some animation on the side, but not going on constantly, because it’s just too much. Little, subtle animations would do. And there are the obvious ones, like don’t use uppercase in large amounts of text for readability.)

So what’s my point? Don’t assume web design can’t be an art just because you don’t think art is not functional. In my personal opinion, web design like a functional art, just like pottery, jewelry, the furniture and other things mentioned above. (And this could go into the ongoing discussion of “What is art?” But that’s a whole debate.)

Despite that, I think the owner of Remidica (the website being reviewed) may have been a bit too extreme with the “web design is art” thought. Sure, it might be art, but as with any functional art, some sensibility has to be taken into thought here.

Modified: November 18th, 2008