Mirificam Press

SWSWi 2009: Not the Same Old Story (Jason Santa Maria - Moderator)

March 25th, 2009 in Web Design Culture

by: Matthew Griffin

The SXSWi panel "Not the Same Old Story" was a look at how design is used to enhance story-telling and more specifically how web design is lacking in this area. With Jason Santa Maria (formerly of Happy Cog) as the moderator, I knew it would be a panel worth checking out. The other panelists included Ian Aldeman (New York Magazine), Daniel Burka (Digg), Nicholas Feltron (Feltron.com), and Liz Danzico: an all-star cast for sure. Also, speaking of all-stars, Jeffrey Zeldman was sitting in the front row just a few yards away from me.

The panel kicked off with Jason Santa Maria introducing the panelists and giving a short overview of the topic of discussion. His primary illustration was and example from Wired Magazine. He pulled up several scanned images of Wired article spreads and pointed out the rich, content enhancing design so typical to the magazine. Each article was a visually engaging and borderline inspiring blend of function and form. But when Santa Maria clicked over to the corresponding article on the Wired website, all the content enhancing design was stripped out. All that was left was the text. As a Wired subscriber this example piqued my interest. Why do we have such a hard time weaving original design into web content?

Who's Responsible for the Content?

From his example, Santa Maria quickly moved to the panelists to start the discussion. The question of who's responsible for content, came up first. In an online universe where readers are becoming more used to commenting, sharing, and mashing content up, where should the line be drawn by the content's original creator? Ian Alderman sees the answer in some level of give and take—a combination of the creator and the consumer. But Daniel Burka of Digg went a step further to say that the consumer's interaction with content is a form of "self-creation" and should as open as possible.

We need to get over our tight control over how people consume our content.
~ Daniel Burka

Later in the panel Daniel continued this line of thought by calling RSS feeds with only partial content "ridiculous". Of course, coming from a Digg employee we can see the reason for his bias, but Nicholas Feltron quickly pointed out that a full-content RSS feed from his own site (feltron.com) would actually be ridiculous since it requires context in order to understand. Jason Santa Maria followed up by asking who should own the content, the creator of the user. I felt like there was a lot of fumbling on this question and no really good answers. I think the reason for the difficulty in this question is found in the very essence of the internet. It's much easier to make broad-stroke generalizations about a medium like print or television, but the web just doesn't fit into a simple mold like that. It encompasses all of those mediums and then some. Sometimes a full content feed is appropriate; sometimes it's not. But I have to ultimately side with the content creator. It's his or her decision how to release original content. I think buying into this "intrinsic public property" idea is a big mistake. But I also think being stingy with content is a big mistake. But the point is that it's yours to be stingy with.

Making an Emotional Connection

In Jason Santa Maria's initial example involving Wired Magazine he showed how print articles were making emotional connections that weren't carrying over to the web. His next question was, how can we create these emotional connections on the web. Feltron answer that it's been the amount of work pumped into his projects that has created that emotional connection. I agree with him here. It's obvious that a lot of work went into the print version of the Wired articles while the web version looked pretty haphazard. It's hard to connect with shoddy work. Danzico, on the other hand explained that personal stake is key to creating an emotional connection between users and content—the users need to be able to comment on, add to, and in some way make the content their own.

This adds a completely new dimension to web content over against print content. Whereas, in print content, you must rely completely on the emotional connection between original content and reader, the web offers a social connection that can, to a large extent, make up for lacking design.

The Story of a Web Site

An interesting sub-topic that wasn't discussed in much detail on the panel is the relationship between archived content and the evolving nature of the design on a particular site. For example, many of the articles on Mirificam Press were originally posted on my original blog, Bits O' NewMedia. They were written and styled for the template of that site and now that they are on Mirificam Press, that original design—that infant context—is lost forever. So, in a sense, the story of the site is broken by my ability to style massive amounts of content, old and new, with just a few changes to a stylesheet. Publications in the print medium are immune to this issue for obvious reasons.

Jason Santa Maria's site is an interesting answer to this dilemma. Every new article he writes has a different design. The nav stays the same but the background photo, layout, and typography all change. It works a little more like a magazine. In the end, it's a matter of quality or quantity. You can pump out a lot of plain content on the web in short order. It just won't look very good.

A Little Worldview Sprinkled on Top

Overall, this panel was thought provoking and relevant to an important issue that web designers must wrestle with. But I couldn't help but notice a particular phrase that kept popping up in the section about user interaction with content—"self-interpretation". This is a meme straight out of the existential dictionary and it's worth taking note when you hear it. Other versions are "self-actualization", and "self-creation". Also, pretty much any time you hear the world self used as a prefix, you should be listening carefully for the other trappings of existentialism.

Since there are so many brands of existentialism, it's difficult to define. But the central theme of all existentialism is the human sense of being thrown into a world with no real reference point (God, for example) on which to base actions or beliefs. The individual is then responsible primarily to create him/herself. This is the only way to transcend the human situation. You'll see a lot of existentialists symbolically embracing Zen Buddhism because of the similarities of the two worldviews. For both, the path to transcendence is through the self.

As Christians we can boldly disagree with the starting assumption of existentialism. Although we have certainly been hurled into a universe, we have the gift of revelation (the Bible) that blows the existential assumption wide open.

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