jtnt://life/unedited

Mark my words: the next fad in web design* will be huge (and I mean really big huge) headline text.

It started with Zeldman’s redesign and continues on a new, bold (pun intended) level with the Coudal Partners redesign.

Who’s next?

* The previous fad, still prevalent today, is the re-emergence of a huge picture with little apparent relevance to the site. (Gee, that’s so artsy! I love artsy.) Coudal gets bonus points for clinging to this fad while at the same time furthering a new one.

Do you love sea monkeys?! Of course you do. Who doesn’t? Those little, mysterious pets we all remember from the back of comic books are just too, well, mysterious and little not to love! Plus, they make reference to them in Dazed and Confused, so they’re a bona-fide pop culture hit in a cultish kind of way. (It’s hip to like sea monkeys, and you’re not un-hip, are you?)

Well, the thing you never thought could happen has happened. Through the miracles of modern science and active use of one’s imagination, Erickson Barnett, a marketing and creative agency, has developed a human-sized mutant version of the sea monkey called the Design Monkey.

We have seen these Design Monkeys roaming the halls and producing work for clients already, so they are alive and fast becoming productive members of our Erickson Barnett society. I can’t wait to see what they’ll do next!

Battling atrophied creative muscles to put into pixels a new design idea for this site. Conspicuously drawn to the grace of simplicity and the captivating nature of top-notch content.

This site is beautiful, and even though I found it via k10k.net, it does not contain any of the following:

• Text so small that it would be hard to read even if it wasn’t put on a non-contrasting background.
• Iframes, iframes, iframes!
• Pixel art.
• A freakish attachment to the use of pixelated fonts.
• Unintuitive navigation icons.

Disclaimer: Yes, k10k contains all of these. Yes, I think k10k sucks. Big time. (There, I said it. Whew!) And yes, I know Scrivs has told us not to bust on the designs of web sites (only the content is open for opinion, apparently) in public.

k10k just deserves it too much. I’ve seen way too many people gush over and link to (but only to the home page) the unusable, unreadable, unbookmarkable, cacophony of iframes that somehow has been passed off to the world as the pinnacle of web design. Honestly, k10k is a case study waiting to happen.

I’m not maintaining that the designers behind k10k are talentless. Certainly, they have more design skills than this techie. Please don’t think I am maintaining I have more skillz than they. I’m sure their billz are much better paid than mine.

They just didn’t really turn it on for their own site. In fact, I think they must have designed the site during lent, having given up sound judgment. Moreover, they undoubtedly have an eye for great design. How else would I have been blessed with the five minutes I spent at the Arne Maynard Garden site?

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Update: Sorry, Paul. I didn’t mean to add to your frustration on the issue of critiques of web design. Indeed, I liked and agreed with what you had to say, and admittedly took your words out of context to make an exciting link. I, too, blame my lack of communication skills and the impossibilities of getting sarcasm across in writing. These blogs can be dangerous things in the hands of us amateurs, huh?

I am testing out a new way of linking to pop-ups and how this affects getting these popped-up pages listed/indexed in Google. The test page is the Erickson Barnett Publications page. We’ll see what happens.

Q: How do you use MT 3?

A: One blog. One author. Completely personal. The free version suits me just fine. Thank you.

The marketing agency who generously hired me almost six years ago, Erickson Barnett, recently hired a new Art Director, Dave Kammerdeiner, to head up our creative department.

I can’t wait to see what the creative team pumps out with this new burst of talent.