About This Blogging Thing...

Anyways, I've also gone ahead and created a blog, something I haven't really had since I last had a domain a few years ago. Shit, I was blogging before the term even existed; we're talking back in the era of E/N sites. StileProject didn't have porn ads, there was no blogosphere. A small legion of us would cradle our journals and scream "stop calling it a blog!".

I'm suffering a little bit of shock here.

Back in the day there really wasn't much out there in terms and resources for anyone who wanted to have a 'blog' (man, i *still* feel weird even using that term.). You wanted a blog, you opened up notepad and you wrote it yourself. You wanted links, you went out there and looked for them. Then you e-mailed other webmasters and you bartered for reciprocal links.

Now it's a simple matter of creating a blog, then clicking a few links. Traffic is created for you. Images are generated online instantly. Templates are everywhere. Honestly, if you have the information architecture, you don't really need anything else. Follow the directions, do a quick google search and you will never have to contact a web designer the entire time. Sounds great, unless you're one of them.

What amazes me is that designers and coders have created so much in terms of generators and templates, that we've almost automated ourselves out of existence. You need a CMS, there's a thousand of them out there. Want to change the design and layout? There's a million templates. Need shiny buttons? Billions. Widgets, snippets, whatever. No need to open up editpadplus or even photoshop nowadays. It makes me nervous.

We're at the point now if you know how to cut&paste, you can have a cutting edge site up and running in a manner of minutes. Honestly, I'm not exaggerating here.

Absolutely amazing. Thrilling too. Now after years of designers talking about "content is king", it might actually be coming true.

The funny part, however, is that even with all of these templates and generators, you'd think we had open-sourced ourselves out of existence. Luckily, the only people who know these things exist are the people they would normally replace.

Thank god the average user is usually overwhelmed, easily confused, and a touch lazy. Otherwise we'd be extinct. Well... almost. There's at least one saving grace to all of this...

(Shit. Is this a rant?)

Anyways... here's what I'm looking forward to; I'd like to see this Web 2.0 design aesthetic to become so popular that it's inescapable.

Because then someone is going to come out of the wordwork with something so against the stream that it's going to be awe-inspiring and amazing.

Not me though. I'm going to dig up some old .PSDs and attempt to jump-start the next "Retro" movement. We're talking '99 retro. Scan lines, small type, monochrome schemes... who's with me?