Mirificam Press

Web Design: The Ephemeral Art

July 29th, 2009 in Web Design Culture

by: Matthew Griffin

After designing for the web for over eight years, I've come to the conclusion that web design is truly a strange and unique art form. There's no other creative craft that quite compares to the temporary nature of it. You might try to compare it to ice sculpting, or sidewalk chalk drawing, or sandcastle building. And though these art forms are temporary (even more temporary than web design), the way in which they deteriorate is completely different. The ice sculpture slowly melts, the chalk is smudged and smeared, and the sandcastle is washed away, but not a web design. A website is not eroded into its primary natural elements. It can be no symbolic offering to natural law. In fact, the opposite is true: the ones and zeros that make up digital design hold faster and firmer that the hardest marble on the statues of Greece and Rome. Paradoxically, there is hardly a website alive today that looks anything like it did ten years ago.

I Want to Be Significant

There are few people in this world who would agree that they don't want to be significant. And I think most that say they don't care are more despairing at the possibility of being significant than they are admitting that they don't desire significance. Web design doesn't offer as much hope of lasting recognition and significance as architecture or other more physical creative acts. I admit, this can be discouraging.

It's funny that the organic, ephemeral nature of web design is for me, simultaneously its most intriguing and most repulsive characteristic. It's intriguing because it opens up opportunities that haven't been available to any designers at any previous time in history. It's repulsive because it keeps me from making any lasting contribution to the world. A new web design flies highest and brightest (as a design) the moment it's launched. But to take a snapshot of it at this point is to diminish it's most important attribute—it's ability to adapt and change. Immediately, it begins to descend as technology pushes forward, styles mutate, and clumsy add-ons are woven in. It's in this descent that a website's beauty is found. The ultimate test of a website is its ability to fail and fade with grace.

But unless you're Hector of Troy, failing with grace is no way to leave a mark. This is why I found it so important to examine my definition of and motivation for acquiring significance. Most of us tend to define significance in terms of reverence from other humans. In other words, the more people who know my name and the longer people remember my name, the more significant I am. This is fine if my fellow human beings are the apex of the universe. But, fortunately, they are not. As John Calvin wrote:

As long as man keeps his head to the ground he is satisfied with what he sees

It's not until we recognize our own insignificance apart from God that we can start to redefine our significance in terms of him. When we are able to do that, we tap into the reality of significance. This leads right into the issue of motivation for significance. Improper motivation for acquiring significance has been around for quite awhile. At the dawn of time the builders of the Tower of Babel said:

Let us make a name for ourselves.

We are no different. Our desire for significance is driven by a lust for glory that doesn't belong to us. But leaving a mark doesn't have to be motivated by selfish ambition. When we build a lasting body of work that is a foundation for future generations to build upon, we are fulfilling God's purpose for our lives. When we view our work as a monument to the glory of our creator, leaving a mark becomes a righteous act. We just have to be careful we're not paying lip service to these ideas to conceal our own glory lust.

Who Is Building a Lasting Web

I don't think anyone has developed a program that can adequately record the essence of the beauty of a website. Nevertheless, there are several companies that are trying. Blurb.com is a self-publishing company with an application that can slurp a blog into a book layout that can then be professionally printed and bound. I used Blurb this year to print a book of my family blog as a gift for my parents. The internet archive at Archive.org caches web pages and archives them so you can essentially turn back the clock on any major web site. Clicktale.com is a service that records the path and movement of website visitors in an animated format. Still, none of these services can capture the beauty of a website the way a canvas captures a painting. Perhaps web design is destined to be the ephemeral art.

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