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This article is part of the Joy Gems series which originally appeared in The Joy Gems Newsletter and/or The Home Page Helper Network on ryze.com, a business networking community. |
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Originally published April 2, 2006.
MEMO: To all graphic artists, illustrators, animators and other multi-media artists.
Before you read on, here's my bad news. The web is a writer's medium.
Okay, you may have already, reluctantly, come to that conclusion. You may have realized what I have realized for a long time. Creating imagery for the web isn't really the greatest thing that ever happened in your life.
The fact that the web is now largely populated with blogs, forums, boards, and other collaborative environments can hardly be breaking news, confirming that this really is a writer's medium. For people like me, it's a paradise with an unlimited supply of paper and ink.
Perhaps my observation is being influenced by the volume of writing I've been doing for my new workshop "Joy Of Code: Practical CSS" to be launched later this year. But that's not it. (How's that for a shameless plug?)
I don't mean to pay short shrift (ever hear of long shrift?) to those elements that do, at minimum, the heavy lifting of holding a user's attention - layout. typography, art direction, color story, imagery and embedded rich media. I'm just here to report the facts as I know them.
How am I so sure in my pronouncement? Get under the hood of any web page by looking at its source code. Do you see images, flash movies or animated gifs? Of course not. All that's there are tags, text, and maybe some scripting language (which is still only text). Even style itself is something brought in from an external file.
"But," you might say, "web pages are a highly visual medium loaded with static images, animation and rich media content." Maybe, but look beneath the surface, look at what's going on behind the scenes - see beyond what the user sees - and there you'll find your answer in the source code. It is a writer's medium.
All the imagery, styling information, and embedded multi-media content are nothing but references or links to files and not the thing itself.
Just what you see as the essence of a web page - the text and tags - is the thing that search engines, assistive technologies - and dare I say, human beings - are really after.
Still not sure? What is native to a web browser? Your copy (text) and tags.
