After three thousand years of explosion, by means of fragmentary and mechanical technologies, the Western world is imploding. During the mechanical ages we had extedned our bodies in space. Today, after more than a century of electric technology, we have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned. Rapidly, we approach the final phase of the extensions of man- the technological simulation of consciousness, when the creative process of knowing will be collectively and corporately extended to the whole of human society, much as we have already extended our senses and our nerves by the various media. Whether the extension of consciousness, so long sought by advertisers for specific products, will be "a good thing" is a question that admits a wide solution. There is little possibility of answering such questions about the extensions of man without considering them all together. Any extension, whether of skin, hand, or foot, affects the whole psychic and social complex.-Marshall McLuhan Understanding Media p. 4 (the first paragraph!)
Problem
Recent web and electronic publication designs rely on gimmicky features
of the "New Medium" that actually impede communication. JavaScript,
ActiveX, Applets, Frames and Proprietary browser extensions confuse and
frustrate viewers. Seldom do they help the viewer navigate information.
Designs overburdened with gimmicks complicate browsers and choke slow
network links. Such electronic design stumbles about like a headless giant, disrupting any
natural grace.
The web confuses viewers because of wildly inconsistent interface design and editorial misdirection.
Designers, Not Luddities
Forcing viewers to update browsers or install special plug-ins
immediately reduces the effectiveness of the overall design, sharply
limiting the "full experience" to those people endowed with
enough technical wizardry to stay on the "bleeding edge" of
browser plug-ins and Java Virtual Machines. A strong design structures
content within a greater context, so viewers can find information with
ease. Is a Java navigation applet an admission that the site is poorly
organized? What if users cannot run Java? The so-called "write
once, run anywhere" mantra of Java has become decidedly misleading-
leaving users of less than monopolistic computer systems out in the long
dark night of electronic media.
We design to keep viewers out of the long dark night of electronic media. We design to keep viewers turned on, and tuned in, not turned off. We employ the best technologies available, not industry hot-buttons. We only offer secure solutions; we're computer and network security experts.
[If you must know, we rely on stable tools like Unix servers (Free BSD, OpenBSD, Linux, Solaris, MacOS X) and MacOS content development tools. We're expert media developers. Oh, and we can code a fair bit too. ;)]
Pay Attention
--ash and jdpf