By Jonathan Black
As a print and online journalism major, I’m constantly told that print journalism is becoming a luxury, while online journalism is becoming norm. Because of this trend, I am supposed to learn the basic complexities of the web in order to make myself more marketable, and ultimately find a job.
Because of this, I tried to find a way to compare web publishing to journalism and it wasn’t until the end of the article that I began to make the connection. I believe Zeldman spent the first three-fourths of this article as a personal rant. He was unhappy that people were trying to design the web when they had no idea what they were doing and others were trying to control the people who knew what they were doing. Even when someone did gain notice for their design, like in a competition, it made new designs uniform because designers tried to model themselves after the previous winner. It’s no wonder I forgot the point of this article was to explain to the reader what web design was.
It wasn’t until he said that web designs should retain their identity that I saw two connections could be made. First is that web design shouldn’t distract from the purpose of the website. BuzzFeed knows that people go their website to see funny lists with gifs. It’s very user friendly that allows the visitor to see what they’ve missed most recently. On the other hand, many news websites like CNN and BBC have horizontal layouts. Their visitors will be looking at their websites for different reasons. Some will want to look at sports, others want to see national news. As a result of this, horizontal layouts offers glimpse into their different sections across the main page. This is similar to headline writing in journalism. No matter what section you’re writing for, you want the reader to have an idea of what the story is about. However, headlines differ across different sections. News headlines will be very straightforward while features content may take a much more creative and witty approach to their headlines.
Lastly, web designs should always be modernizing and changing with whatever the mass public thinks. At the same time they have to keep their individuality. This seems similar to the concept of a freelance reporter. A freelance reporter must change their style in order to match the style of the publication their writing for, but in that process they must not change their voice. In the end their voice is what gets them hired and in the end, the web design’s identity is what keeps people coming back.