Firstly…
Bit of house-keeping as this is my first post.
I’m Jamie. I’m a front-end web developer at Equator in Glasgow. I’m part of small-ish team that is devoted to producing the best-coded front-end web interfaces known to humanity (nothing wrong with aiming high, after all) and helping to understand the frankly weird and esoteric world of web user experience.
Right now I’m thinking about the evolving understanding of just what it is that people do with the web and what the web does with people. My general feeling is that assumptions based on other types of media aren’t going to get us very far. The curve is getting steeper, the strange, chaotic, emergent nature of the interwebs is ramping up. Best to hang on tight, because the human brain really hasn’t had anything to compare to this. It’s the future, after all.
But thinking about that kind of thing all day doesn’t really lead to much in the way of practical creation, except maybe for a small puddle of dribble, threatening to short-circuit your keyboard when you run out of metaphors. So I also like to think about (or wrestle with) the nitty-gritty.
Forms, for one thing. I have a bit of a love/hate thing going on with them. Nothing nittier or grittier than wrangling form elements across 5 or 6 different browsers. I’m sure they’ll crop up here fairly regularly.
Also the fact that web pages can be brittle if you hold on too tight to their design. One second they’re gleaming, aligned collages of design perfection, then a word count creeps too high or a typeface causes a funny reaction and, crunch, bones snap, limbs flail wildly and the whole thing just goes… off.
That antagonises me so much. If there is perfection to be found on the web, it certainly isn’t in the interactions of bits of software. So don’t bother looking for it there.
Anyway. That’s a fair amount of fluff to start with. Hopefully things will get a bit more comprehensible and useful as we go along.
So. What’s next?