Essays and articles

How should we go about making rules for typesetting on the web?

For the past six months I’ve been taking a good look at how designers and developers communicate with one another, jotting down the problems as I go. The systems that have cropped up in between are fascinating but I believe they could be better if we examine our use of language.

The directories, files and partials, as well as all of the code and documentation that makes up our front-end development system, is an interface. It’s high time we started thinking about its usability – for the sake of developers and users alike.

When we read books they leave traces of our reading and these traces are often used as marks of ownership. So should websites be so squeaky clean when we revisit them? Is there some other form of trace that can be left other than the snarky comments left hidden in their depths?

What do we want from storytelling machines? And when publishers use terms such as ‘interactivity’ or ‘immersion’, what do they really mean? These terms either describe a genuine glimpse of the future, or a new form of commercial and technological chutzpah. But what is it that we’re really hunting here? What’s our digital Moby Dick?

The journey from reader to writer is a perilous one, and bad design affects all of this information on transit as we read.