Everything you know about web design is wrong! (SXSW day 1)

By Kari & Synve

Dan Willis, Sapient

Dan Willis from Sapient lured us to his talk with the catchy title “Everything you know about webdesign is wrong”. He stated that web design today is still not a design discipline in its own right. He went on to postulate “the grammar of trancendent web design”. We liked this! Read more about the talk and check out our “Cowgirls 4 Ever”-score! On our first day of the SXSW Interactive Festival, we started out listening to Dan Willis from Sapient. Willis talked about how film making transcended fromt a theatre format (where the viewer had a really good seat) into a medium of its own. This occurred around 1915, and the techniques that really changed the medium were cross-cutting, close-ups and bird’s eye views. This consituted a new “grammar of film”.

Willis postulated that current web design is basically “print in disguise”, and gave numerous examples to build this argument. He predicts that at some point in the future (possibly as we write this), a new “grammar of web design” will describe a web design discipline that has come into its own, transcending print design. He proposes five elements to this grammar:

• random voyeurism (example: flickrvision)
• self-aware, but controlled, content (i.e. content with metadata)
• user-created content
• ambient awareness (e.g. twitter)
• experiential content (not about content types like audio, video, text, but about the experience of the mix as a whole – “the experience is the content”)

Although this grammar is tentative, it is not too far-fetched, as we already see these elements in web design today. So the ingredients within the grammar are not new, but proposing these elements of web design as a grammar, and drawing the parallell to the shift within film making is interesting.

Willis also offered some opinions on the role of visual design, expressing that visual design is a means to an end – “it is what it does”. Design is problemsolving, it’s not about being pretty. So although some of the “print in disguise” websites look pretty, they are not effective in achieving a result on the web because they do not promote the “web native” stuff.

Where Willis let us down a bit was at the end, where his offers for practical application of this grammar was at best sketchy. However, the overall content was interesting and his presentation form was both engaging, professional and entertaining. Willis’ slides are available online: “Everything You Know About Web Design Is Wrong”

The Cowgirls 4 Ever Score (6 cows is best score)

Technical content:

Presentation:

Other presentations that we attended:

• Paul Annett (Clearleft): ” Oooh. That’s clever! (Unnatural Experiments in Web Design) “. Evaluation: Good value in technical content, and excellent entertainment value.  Best presentation so far! Slides can be found at

• Brian Brushwood (ScamSchool):  “Social Engineering: Scam your way into anything or from anybody”. Evaluation: High entertainment value, but completely incomprehensible why this presentation was in the interactive program at all. Not his fault.

If you have any questions about any of the presentations we attended, or about the South By South West Interactive Festival in general, drop us a line. Or just follow us on twitter – http://www.twitter.com/khamnes & http://www.twitter.com/synver.