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https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/20/ransom-note-force-field/#antilibraries>
"One thing Myspace had going for it: it was exuberantly ugly. The decision to
let users with no design training loose on a highly customizable user-interface
led to a proliferation of Myspace pages that vibrated with personality.
The ugliness of Myspace wasn't just exciting in a kind of outsider/folk-art way
(though it was that). Myspace's ugliness was an anti-cooption force-field,
because corporate designers and art-directors would, by and large, rather break
their fingers and gouge out their eyes than produce pages that looked like
that.
In this regard, Myspace was the heir to successive generations of "design
democratization" that gave amateur communities, especially countercultural
ones, a space to operate in where authentic community members could be easily
distinguished from parasitic commercializers.
The immediate predecessors to Myspace's ugliness-as-a-feature were the web and
desktop publishing. Between the img tag, imagemaps, the blink tag, animated
GIFs, and the million ways that you could weird a page with tables and padding,
the early web was positively bursting with individual personality. The early
web balanced in an equilibrium between the plunder-friendliness of "view
source" and the topsy-turvy design imperatives of web-based layout, which
confounded both print designers (no fixed fonts! RGB colorspaces! dithering!)
and even multimedia designers who'd cut their teeth on Hypercard and CD ROMs
(no fixed layout!).
Before the web came desktop publishing, the million tractor-feed ransom notes
combining Broderbund Print Shop fonts, joystick-edited pixel-art, and a cohort
of enthusiasts ranging from punk zinesters to community newsletter publishers.
As this work proliferated on coffee-shop counters and telephone poles, it was
visibly, obviously distinct from the work produced by "real" designers – that
is, designers who'd been a) trained and b) paid by a corporation to employ that
training.
All of this matters, and not just for aesthetic reasons. Communities –
especially countercultural ones – are where our society's creative ferment
starts. Getting your start in the trenches of the counterculture wars is no
proof against being co-opted later (indeed, many of the designers who cut their
teeth desktop publishing weird zines went on to pull their hair and roll their
eyes at the incredible fuggliness of the web). But without that zone of
noncommercial, antiestablishment, communitarian low weirdness, design and
culture would stagnate."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
