My response is here http://www.createonline.co.uk/f-survey.asp?ID=71
Apparently a one Mr Dineen took umbrage to my comments about CD-Rom designers, easily the least offensive thing I said I thought ...
-------- Original Message -------- From: "Mark Higham" <mark.higham(at)futurenet.co.uk> To: simon(at)profero.com Subject: Create letter in response to your comments Date: Wed, 06 Sep 2000 10:45:26 +0100 Simon, I've received the following email from a CreateOnline reader who seems to have taken exception to your comments about CD-ROM design, quoted in issue three. I intend to print the letter but as a matter of course I'm passing it along to you to see if you want to reply. If you do, then I'll need a response ASAP and certainly within the next couple of days. If you're too busy, let me know. Cheers, Mark. -------------------------------- Mark Higham, Editor-in-Chief, CreateOnline Magazine, Future Publishing (London). direct line: 020 7317 2433 mob: 07909 681793 fax: 0207 317 2644 to subscribe: 01458 271108 mailto:mark.higham(at)futurenet.co.uk * TO SUBSCRIBE, CALL: 01458 271108; create.subs(at)futurenet.co.uk Issue three on sale now; Issue four, the Branding issue, on sale Monday 11 September - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Just wanted to see if there was any chance of Simon Wistow clarifying one of his statements in issue 3's Top 100 Survey. In the "Is there a style of British Web Design?" section Mr Wistow states: "...American new Media is dominated by ex multimedia CD-ROM designers, and it shows." What is that supposed to mean? What problem exactly does Mr Wistow have with ex CD-ROM designers? The fact that they may have been dabbling with the Internet a few years before the current wave of pure netheads? The fact that they are not "pure-bred" online designers? The implication is that the "templated and dull" design style that Cre@te seem to loathe so much is a direct descendant of CD-ROM design. (It's also a method that Jakobites and successful brands, such as amazon.co.uk, have found works and keeps a company afloat). It's a bit of an arrogant statement to have made. It seems that we have got to the same point in the growth of the online medium that was reached by the multimedia authors around 1995 when we all looked for some other media to slate as inferior. Print became the scapegoat and everyone railed against its lack of interactivity and dynamism. Anyone involved with print was behind the times. From his statement above it seems that Mr Wistow has chosen his new media scapegoat. If you really want to speak to people that know this industry, that don't rely on keeping their staff simply because they offer gym memberships and private bars, then you'll generally find that they were playing with Director when it was still a Macromind product and Vector animation on the Web was considered something out of Bladerunner. These were the people who championed the Web through hybrid CD-ROMs and experimental sites, when the marketeers and bluechips thought it was the devil's breath. CD building taught us all of the lessons that we are still applying to the Web - that navigation needs to be intuitive, that content is king, that quirk outshines ego every time. The people that Simon Wistow has so breezily slighted are generally collaborators who broke from their traditional roots of AI, print, Fine Arts, Typography, Animation and Music to try and create a discipline that would transcend the boundaries that we are all still trying to push through online. Perhaps if Mr Wistow considered his provenance and that of his colleagues, he would consider this a rather foolish statement. - Dan Dineen -------- Original Message -------- From: "Simon Wistow" <swistow(at)hotmail.com> To: mark.higham(at)futurenet.co.uk Subject: Re: Create letter in response to your comments Date: Thu, 07 Sep 2000 04:21:48 GMT I've received the following email from a CreateOnline reader who seems >to have taken exception to your comments about CD-ROM design, quoted in >issue three. I intend to print the letter but as a matter of course I'm >passing it along to you to see if you want to reply. If you do, then >I'll need a response ASAP and certainly within the next couple of days. > >If you're too busy, let me know. Well actually I'm in the middle of Indonesia in a bamboo shack paying a fortune for net access so sorry if this isn't a brilliant reply but here goes ...The statement that was printed was a pretty poor representation of my views on the nu meeja industry. It was a half line sound bite that, whilst not quite taken out of context, didn't really get across what I wanted to say. What I meant was that, from what I've heard from various Merkin friends, the web industry out there is dominated by ex multimedia designers and that definitley shows through - a lot of them escaped the CD-Rom holocaust and went into 'new media' a bought with them their Macromedia Director skills - which is why Macromedia bought Futuresplash from Futurewave and renamed it Shockwave Flash (hence the SWF file extesnion) and turned it into a plugin for Director, then later spun it off into it's own product, basically beacuse Director, as a bitmap orientated product, is just not scaleable to the web (Of course Flash isn't ideal either in my opinion but that's another story) I am certainly not a fan of the current British New Media scene and agree with many of Mr Dineen's comments - I hate the ultra trendy Nathan Barleys out there and their total lack of respect for standards or lessons learnt the hard way in the last 6 years. Ex-print designers who breeze into a web design agency, don't know how to use Dreamweaver let alone hand code HTML, slap togther a totally derivative PSD file in Photoshop then email it to a HTML monkey to have it turned into a web page. This poor guy then has to spend hours checking every single fricking browser version on every platform trying to get that Ooh so groovy semi circle in the bottom right of the screen to line up with the gradually fading parallel lines on the top left. I could rant on for ever about so many things and I was a bit disapointed that none of the rest of my comments were printed (although most of it was hate filled vitriol against 'net marketing execs) but I'm going to stop here. I'm sorry Mr Dineen got the wrong idea about me and if it's any consolation to him I'm so fed up with the whole 'scene' that I quit my job about a month ago and I'm currently living in a shack by a beach next to the Pacific ocean (although I still check my email once a week). It's a hard knock life. Simon Wistow ex Nu Meeja Hor Hope that helps. BTW, didn't you used to be Editor of ST Format?