BOOK+MOVIE

HYBRIDS

Integrating print with

sound & motion

pictures

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PAIN PANG PRIMITIVE WEB DESIGN

"LOOK AROUND THE WEB and visit some high-profile corporate web sites and notice how many of them use wallpaper for a background. None. That's a serious clue that wallpaper is for amateur designers, web hobbyists, and hallways.

... Wallpaper is very distracting when you're trying to read text on a web page. We've mentioned before that some web techniques can become tedious or boorish after several pages. Wallpaper can reach that level in one page."

... GIF animations are simplistic, repetitive, and monotonous in nature."

... Please: Don't place multiple GIF animations on a single page—one animation is distracting enough. Using three or four rotating, spinning, flying, blinking images on a single page can take that page to the next level: from amateurish to nauseating."

Williams, Tollett, Rohr

Robin Williams Web Design Workshop, 2002.

OUR COMMENT

We've looked around and one thing we've noticed is that so-called professional-looking websites can easily be achieved today by nonprofessionals with cheap and simple-to-use software and the millions of ready-made webpage creation templates that are at their disposal. And if they have a couple hundred dollars to spend, they can easily have someone else do it all for them.

So, with professional-looking websites being cranked out by the millions everywhere every day, we've decided that a decisively nonprofessional, homemade look was in order.

Painpang.com

ANOTHER COMMENT

"Art?... It's all fashion. Only time will tell what's worthwhile. What makes a lasting impression."

Francis Bacon

THE NOTORIOUSLY

UNPROFESSIONAL

LOOK

1. Web designers hate wallpaper. And not just because background images make overlying text difficult to read.

• We love our wallpaper. But we have provided "printer-friendly" versions of most webpages that you may find to be more reader-friendly. (Note: printer-friendly pages = reader-friendly pages. They contain black text on white backgrounds.)

2. Web designers hate animated GIFs. And not only because they make adjacent text difficult to read by being so distracting. One complaint is that besides being repetitive and boring, they look too much like ads that everyone hates.

• We love the animated GIFs we use. And yes, every thing we put out there is some sort of ad for ourselves. We are ashamed to say this. But anyone who says he is not a shameless self-promoter should be ashamed of himself.

3. Web designers hate animated GIFs that play forever.

• Ours play forever. To stop animations on any page, press the "escape" key (Esc) after the page has finished loading; in Netscape on a Mac, press Command Period.

4. Web designers hate dark backgrounds.

• We love dark backgrounds. But we have provided "printer-friendly" versions of most pages that you can choose to view if you have trouble reading the text or you just prefer webpages with black text on white backgrounds.

5. Web designers everwhere love to recite their mantra of "clean" design.

• Bless our mess and God save the closet minimalist.

6. Everyone everywhere hates slow downloads caused by large file sizes.

• We do too. Some image heavy pages can take 30 seconds plus to load with a dial-up modem. We hope you won't be disappointed if you choose to suffer through the wait. The "printer-friendly" pages load much faster, and you can reach all of them from the links provided on the "printer-friendly" version of our homepage. But they have few images.

[Note: printer-friendly pages = reader-friendly pages. We hope our "printer-friendly" page versions actually do turn out to be printer-friendly and reader-friendly for those who have a problem with either. Setting black text against a white background should help save ink in any printer that is set to print backgrounds.

But we have not designed any webpage so that it prints just the way it looks on your computer screen. Until we do, the printed page may look unpleasantly haphazard. Nevertheless the print should be legible if not the images.]

reader-friendly version

spooks rule

spooky mission