effervescent refractions

Jean Cocteau, among the many things he is famous for, said the following:

“Art produces ugly things which frequently become more beautiful with time. Fashion, on the other hand, produces beautiful things which always become ugly with time.”

I believe his statement relates remarkably to the Web 2.0 phenomenon and the monstrosity it has spawned within the web design world. Blogs, Ajax, tag clouds, RSS, wikis, all that stuff is fab.ulo.us. The technology itself is pushing us forward and I couldn’t be happier about it.

Our problems begin with the confusion between the underlying attitude (because Web 2.0 is just that) and the visual design that naturally arises from it. Now if web designers are making that confusion, we’re in for some serious trouble with the audience, which in demographic terms, is becoming wider every day. What I mean to say is, for the sake of the savvy and unsavvy alike, don’t equate this technology with the gooey, glossy, blobular trap that so many are falling into.

Five or ten years from now, I don’t want to be remembering Web 2.0 as the ’80s of web design, neon colored bloated parachute pants and all. The visual design of today is simply a passing fashion, don’t be one of those sites we’re ashamed to look back at, like the GIF-swollen examples of 1996.