Hans van der Kamp

When I started building websites in the mid nineties, everybody in the field was an amateur. There were few training possibilities, so we lived under the guidance of RTFM; Read The Fucking Manual. I was under the impression that I was one of the few photographers over the age of forty doing web design. Soon I learned that was a misjudgment. Many pioneers in web design were photographers.

Looking back on it, that was no miracle either. Photographic techniques were constantly changing, so most photographers were quite flexible. Most professional designers however seemed to be allergic to two things; digital technology and functionality. Much like fashion designers they were dinosaurs as far as computers were concerned. As a rule they used Mac computers, not only because they ‘looked better’, but because the software on these machines is idiot-proof. (This is by no means a denial of the fact that Macs are superior machines, that is — if you can live with the fact that there is so little choice of software to expand your horizon in a technical sense.)

If you have ever tried to carve a steak with a designer’s knife, or poured coffee from a designer’s can, you will know that most designers are absolutely deaf and blind to functionality. If you think this is an overstatement; try sitting in a Rietveld chair for one night, or better yet; try to embrace your partner in it like you would do in an ordinary chair. Within seconds you will find yourself in a classy pile of firewood picking splinters from your behind.

Few designers care about you or the functionality of the items they have designed — but you have to hand it to them; they are not too shy to use these products themselves. Just walking through the city one can spot designers from a mile just by looking at the glasses they wear. Whatever the fashion is, they always wear glasses that are utterly impractical and will look hopelessly ridiculous on photographs two or three years from now. To make things worse design as an art form has always been underexposed and underrated, so they act like arrogant, pompous, know-it-alls to compensate for their misfortunes. (Please bare in mind; it takes one to recognize one.)

So I would rather file them under ‘masochists’ than under ‘misanthropes’ and of course we could not live without them. Our society would be absolutely boring without design and it is very easy to ridicule a particular profession or any profession at all for that matter. I could ridicule photographers like myself even more effectively and come to think of it — I probably will one of these days.

With websites becoming more important every day, the interest of graphic designers who normally work for printed media is shifting towards the web. This resulted in better looking websites that do not function very well. Which is okay of course if the content of a site is of such high relevance that visitors gladly take a day off trying to locate the content they are looking for. Fact is that a site that will win an award for design is likely to have fewer visitors than a website designed by a code hacker who knows about compatibility, search engine optimization, and content navigation. Just look at the top ten of best visited sites and it becomes quite obvious that no graphic designer ever entered the building of the companies exploiting these sites. (With the exception of the logo, of course.)

At age 16 my son went to a school for graphic design that was slowly shifting towards a school for new media. You can imagine the chaos on a school where teachers were still deeply committed to printing, paper and hand-binding books, while in fact they had to teach action scripting, interface design and other multimedia disciplines. I have always adored my son for being a better person than I am, because he is an unlikely genetic mix of the best of his mother and the best of me, but I have learned to admire him even more for his ability not to become insane in an environment where insanity rules.

My son is now almost 22 and in the coming week he will graduate from this school and he is one of the first of a new generation who works with typography and design within a web environment. Although he did do some design for printed media, his portfolio is filled with designs for websites and other interactive applications. I feel pretty sure that the chaos he worked in during his education will have discouraged him enough to pursue a career of ‘websites only’. His interest in art has become broader and he will probably continue his studies sooner or later on an art academy to become an independent artist.

Whatever happens, I strongly hope that photographer-web designers and designers who are brought up to pimp printed media will slowly withdraw from the web to leave web design to a new generation of true professionals, so that in a few years the web will be wiped clean from the alienating web design that has become the trademark of graphic designers who think in ink and paper.

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