To be honest, I didn’t actually know it was called semantics until I read that little segment, it was just something that I’ve felt for a while, and now I can put a name to it, the thoughts to write about it just started flowing like <clicks fingers> that.
My problem is with the nature of alot of the designs we’re beginning to see these days. Theres no focus. It’s ‘shotgun design’ rather than laser-targeted sniper design. It results in images which are wishy-washy and transient rather than solid, effective and timeless.
There’s less thought going into making something mean something, and more emphasis on the ‘wow’ factor. Images of dancers frozen in mid air surrounded by glowing lines, birds, bonsai trees on floating islands on a background of grunge graffiti splatters.
It looks great, but what does it actually mean? Sure, it doesn’t really have to mean anything, perhaps it’s just an expression of oneself or expression of technical ability. But isn’t it so much more fulfilling when you see an image and you can say ‘Oh right, I get it… that’s pretty clever.’, or an image which ‘speaks’ to you on some level? That’s design that has taken the time to bring proper semantics into play.
This ability to infuse designs with a meaning or give them some kind of intuitive direction seems like it’s on the decline in the design world. We are more interested in the technical ability of a photoshop artist, and pay more attention to how much wow visual sugar we can load into an image. Fewer and fewer will take the time to understand composition, proportion, colors, spacial relationships and ways to give their work meaning.
It’s much easier to take a generic font, give it a bevel and load gradient onto it to give it that shiny ‘Web 2.0′ look, than to to think through why it looks that way and who the targets are. Does it make any sense or not?
I’ll probably go into this topic in more depth in a future post but for now, I’m interested in finding out what your views on the issue are. Let’s chop it up*.
*Talk about it.
