MentalX

The Web is Lame or Where's the Emotion?

I am working on my 3rd feature length screenplay. After several months of working on random songs here and there, I have also been toying with the idea of putting together a 5 song EP. Both of these ventures have lead me to thinking about emotion, and, when you get right down to it, how emotion on some level has to be present to create a great album, movie, or novel.

I am more or less an interactive designer by trade, though I will admit that I do so many different things this title is a little misleading. I spent the first 5 years of my career doing primarily graphic design and graphic art direction, even though I was trained in interactive design. This is all to say that I have some perspective.

My initial thinking about emotion was as it relates to graphic design, and static art (paintings, sculptures and such). Can static art provoke emotions? Sure. How about graphic design? This one is a little bit more difficult, and my ultimate answer is yes…and no. Let me explain.

I feel, and have always felt, that there is a distinction between graphic design and graphic art. My thinking is certainly not as strict as the typesetter vs. graphic design split that is championed by many of the Cranbrook folks. James Victore’s work is graphic art. A great deal of the work that comes out of Pentagram is graphic art. Same goes for JNL Design. Aside from the good ones, most standard ad agency work is graphic design, or typesetting. It is boring, not thoughtful, and in general was design by rules rather than passion. Having worked in the field, and having created only a few things that I feel qualify as graphic art, I know just how hard of a task it is to create graphic art, especially given particular confines (namely, a client).

And, maybe that’s the end of it. Maybe it’s the client that sucks the life out of certain projects whether they are static or not. I, however, tend to think that the act of provoking emotion is something that is much easier to do over a span of time. It is easier for a song or a movie to get you emotionally involved than it is for a static image to. If you counted the number of times that a movie made you laugh, or cry, versus that of a painting, I’m sure movies win out.

This brings me to the world wide web. The web has the distinct advantage over static arts in that it is interactive, but still, the majority of it is totally and completely boring. Nearly all web sites (mine included) looks like some shitty agency-designed brochure. The answer to the dull sites of the ’90s was to add more interactivity, some media, and more recently create a full-blown application. This has never address the problem of an emotionless web, which does have the advantage of being non-static. Why is this?

Is it because of the limitations of the web? Is it because of browser complications? Is it because web designers are, in general, very analytical? Is it because of accessibility issues? Is it because the internet is simply a distributor of information, and that information is king? Is it because of the laws and standards of interaction?

Now, maybe the web I see is not the web that is out there. And I am certain there are many interesting things happening in web design…somewhere. It is just not very often that I stumble upon them. Most everything I see is a complete snoozefest that lacks emotion or passion of any kind. I am not pretending to be any different, nor to have any of the answers. But I am going to continue to think about the web and how it relates to other art forms as it’s own art form. I am going to start a search for an interesting web. Surely the web is about more than just distribution.