hyalineskies

“We are disillusioned by our own subculture as we find our own intraindustry trends such as Ruby on Rails to script.aculo.us, but even with all of the ‘the web design industry is still looked upon as artistically impoverished in comparison to other creative industries’ talk of the previous few paragraphs, we can’t ignore the respect that we are gaining. Ironically, or maybe, in some subversive manner, purposefully, our trendiness is beginning to leak further into the mainstream. The Web’s trendiness as well as the Web as haute couture philosophy is a direct result of our Web 2.0 advocacy.”

It seems that this whole web design business is getting trendy. I interview Jake Tracey, Roger Johansson, and Michael Heilemann, all three industry personalities and 9rules network members, on their views of the trendiness in design, only to find a bit of a conflicting intraindustry opinion: are we being egotistic?

It’s necessary to listen to our readers’ feedback both on content and design, even if the only feedback we’re receiving is in the form of statistics. I explore a scrapped redesign, content e-mails, and the rules of web usability to come to a powerful conclusion that we are doing more than maintaining our own sites: we’re maintaining the social infrastructure that Web 2.0 is founded upon.

I explore American Apparel’s design and marketing, only to find that the Lomography of apparel has gotten absolutely everything right in four steps, none of which include a supermodel.

After reading an article that appeared on del.icio.us/popular, I found that not everything popular is actually true. I put Gmail’s antivirus scanner through the EICAR test gauntlet and it passes with flying colours. Gmail’s still got a bit of a problem, though: it’s slowly getting to the point where it’s playing catch-up with its competitors.

“The music I was listening to then I absolutely despise now; I actually purged my music collection of gigabytes of pessimistic, depressive, whiny tunes of angst, replacing it with Euroasian dance and electronica, songs of upbeat 4/4 rhythms and optimistic lyrics. Now, I’m a core founder of MEDMA, the Michigan Electronic Dance Music Association, and I actively despise emo and pop-punk. My indie-music designer friends still listen to their whiny counterculture pessimism and look at me condescendingly when I tell them that I dislike Radiohead, Death Cab for Cutie, Broken Social Scene, and Sufjan Stevens.”

A friend finds depressing music, well, depressing.