Aesthetic

Google's meteoric rise to Web domination, near universal recognition, and canonization in the dictionary has been driven by their unparalleled execution of a simple function: returning the most relevant search results to Web users who are looking for love, car parts, or Jeopardy answers (I mean questions). It hasn't hurt that they have buttressed their core competency with a host of useful applications, mostly provided for free, that each reinforce and drive users back to that search function, their primary source of revenue. All the while, Google has resisted the siren call of a design makeover, apparently content with their "progammer aesthetic". Now, don't get me wrong. Programmers rock! And programming is very much a creative endeavor. As the Wordpress slogan nicely puts it: "Code is Poetry". Nonetheless, you can tell when a company unwilling to spring for a designer has dubbed their programmer for the task. The result is rarely pretty. But in view of their success, one could conclude that Google represents a decisive victory of function over form, or perhaps even the irrelevance of good design. But that might be a bit hasty. Their triumph is something less than a repudiation of the importance of design. I would contend that Google has succeeded in spite of its lack of content hierarchy, structure, and visual appeal, not because of it.

In this new century, Web designers and developers have been on a crusade to standardize the rendering of webpages across platforms and browsers so that all comers experience the Web consistently. It is a noble ideal, and it has been a pitched battle with the continuing prevalence of Microsoft's Internet Explorer 6 retarding the adoption of these standards. But with the now waning dominance of IE, these standards are winning the day, making life much easier for designers like myself, and forcing even Microsoft to join ranks with the latest incarnation of its Web browser, albeit half a decade late. (IE6 has become virtually a four-letter word amongst designers and developers.) For the end-user, this standardization means that webpages can be more attractive and interactive, both because more reliable tools are available to the developer and because less time needs be spent hacking code. However, though I am an enthusiastic supporter of these standards, there is one that I continue to be guilty of breaking, and for good reason. So, penitently, here's my confession.

It seems nigh impossible to unlearn the punctuation rules we were schooled in. For example, inserting two spaces after a period is a relic of the typewriter, a convention used to avoid the "rivers" of white space created by monospaced fonts. But though this convention has long since been deprecated, I have found it to be a fool's errand trying to help older writers unlearn the reflexive habit of punching the space bar twice after a full stop. Nonetheless, if only in my own writing and editing, I'm on a personal mission to overturn convention, to promote using the hyphen in a way that it correctly communicates what is intended.

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