Living in the Future

MacBook AirWe’re living in the future, and I’ll tell you why: if you’re drinking water and breathing air in a time when a Steve Jobs-helmed Apple Inc. maintains stock keeping units for both a handheld computing device and an ultra-portable sub-notebook (the thinnest notebook on the market, no less), then clearly you’ve left behind the constraints of late 20th and early 21st century life and entered the wide, wonderful world of science fiction.

Back then, back in the distant past, Apple only ever entertained products that could fit inside a conveniently simplistic matrix of desktops and laptops of two grades: consumer or professional. To ask for a device of a more unusual order — something of the sort that even Apple’s less prolific rivals were regularly shipping even a decade ago — was a farcical daydream. Want to carry around an Apple-branded data device in your pocket? Want to tote around a Macintosh laptop all day without bringing on spinal injury? It just wasn’t done, son.

But now, today, we’ve got the MacBook Air, a laptop so thin and light it’s named after a shoe. At just three pounds, it fits inside a manila envelope, and is practically guaranteed to bring about envy in those with heavier laptops for at least the next three months. It’s not perfect — no Ethernet port, no FireWire port, and no swappable battery — but you know what? I’ll take it. After all those years of unrequited pining for a sub-notebook, the future looks just fine.

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The Story So Far

Last year, I spent a good deal of time talking about how print designers often fail to realize that the shift from analog to digital media also represents a shift from narrative to behavior — a fundamental change in the language and purpose of graphic design. That’s still an important concept, I think.

But after looking at portfolio after portfolio over the past two years while recruiting talent for an employer that still places a high value on narrative, I should shade this argument further: the future of this profession is not predicated simply on a one-way shift from the sensibilities of analog to the sensibilities of digital.

It’s a two-way street. Granted, the majority of the shift is incumbent upon the analog-minded. But there is a tremendous amount of storytelling that needs to be told in digital media, too, and a tremendous amount to be recovered from the craft of art direction, a discipline that is seemingly stranded in the analog world.

My complaint, right now, is that the majority of storytelling that happens on the Web is based in the interactively rich environment made possible by Flash. Flash has its uses, and I have no particular disdain for the medium. But its unique value is becoming less essential over time even as native tools like CSS and JavaScript become more capable.

Actually, I should rephrase this argument: not enough Web standards-minded designers are thinking narratively in the way that our Flash-fluent colleagues are. The vast majority of practitioners of XHTML, CSS and JavaScript are almost exclusively dedicated to behavioral work — interfaces and templates. There’s very little narrative design being done with these tools, and that’s a shame.

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