Bring Back Fun
One of my favorite presentations from last week's An Event Apart was by Daniel Mall. He talked about the allies of web developers. We, as web developers, have long embraced HTML and CSS. More recently, JavaScript crossed the line from an annoyance littering our markup to an unobtrusive hero. We started embracing JavaScript when it became easy to separate script behavior from markup. Jeremy Keith wrote about behavioral separation in 2006. Once that separation became as easy as separating CSS from HTML, JavaScript's popularity soared.
According to Daniel Mall, Flash is still the outcast. Web developers haven't embraced flash. We're still living in the year 2000, when Flash was 99% bad.
Dan Mall made the case that it's not Flash itself that's bad, but the way that we're using it. If we can easily implement Flash in a similarly unobtrusive way as modern JavaScript, it can work it's magic and encourage people to play.
...and we need to play more. Dan Mall asked everyone to remember back to a time when we were blown away by websites — a time before we cared about usability. Almost every web developer was inspired some horribly unusable — but fun — site.
The sites Dan mentioned as inspiring in his early years included Neostream.com, 2Advanced, and Once Upon A Forest. These sites encourage exploration and play.
If we take our same jQuery mindset and apply it to Flash, we might bring fun and playfulness back to web design. Flash allows for even more immersive and interactive progressive enhancement than JavaScript.
Personal Inspiration
The sites that blew me away in my early years were from 1996/7:
- Volume One — I was awe-struck by Matt Owen's groundbreaking animated gifs. I vividly remember seasons one, two, and three from '97. By season five he was working with Flash and playing with sound. Around this time, I was so inspired that I had become a full-time web designer.
- jodi.org — In 1996 I had no idea what this site was about. I still don't. However, you could spend an hour clicking around and looking at crazy hypertext. There's a Wikipedia page that explains the purpose, but it's more fun to just waste time on http://wwwwwwwww.jodi.org/.
- Super Bad — Similar to jodi.org, superbad.com is some artist's playground that I found more fun than a Choose Your Own Adventure book.
All these sites are from years ago. They seem useless and unusable. However, they inspired a generation of kids to become web designers and developers. How? Play.
Questions
- What new sites forsake usability for play in order to inspire today's generation? Or are we so caught up in usability that there's no time to play anymore? (Yes, a usable site can be more inspiring than a fun site, it's just a different kind of inspiration).
- What were the sites that blew you away and inspired you?
Daniel Mall sees a future — not too distant — where we can work with Flash as easily and unobtrusively as JavaScript, making progressive enhancements more fun and interactive. Fun is good. I hope he's right.
Comments
Here is a fun and awesome exploration of what you can do with HTML5's canvas and audio elements: http://9elements.com/io/projects/html5/canvas/
Read something more recent.
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Visitors
Go to panic.com/goods
Drag a t-shirt into the "Cart" at the bottom of the screen.
Drag it back out. poof!
Go to their home page -- you can download any of their software by dragging its icon to the green arrow. (It's even documented.) Try it out.
What I love about Panic's site (or maybe i should say, collection of sub-sites) is they combine fun with functionality in a surprisingly usable way. It's a very pleasant experience.
(The underlying pleasant fun+usable may also be why I have purchased all three of their major apps and several of their minor ones.)