The more things change the more things stay the same.

A col­lec­tion of evolving tech­nolo­gies for media devel­op­ment are bringing us back­wards in time, or per­haps around to, and ulti­mately through, the old promise of dig­ital design and into a new world where designers can once again be designers, leaving the pro­duc­tion to the professionals.

Inter­ac­tive designers who code web­sites are like print designers who know how to operate a web offset press. It’s a little ridicu­lous in modern times although, way back when, the designers and printers were not always so dif­fer­en­ti­ated. So it was with the begin­ning of the web. Cre­ating web pages was rather simple. It was fea­sible to have designers who could create web pages. Anyone could learn. Of course, not everyone knew this right away. Web pages were the domain of twenty-something slackers who dropped out of col­lege to ride the sil­icon wave into the crash of 2001, making a lot of money along the way. Web­sites were built by the young nephew of the guy who runs the com­pany “because he under­stands this web stuff”. But the slackers got a little older and aus­tere, and every young punk coming out of high school knew how to make a web page.

Then the tech­nology got more com­pli­cated. Javascript became a stan­dard tool in the developer’s toolbox. CSS came to be. Flash dropped a bomb on everyone, pushing the web for­ward per­haps even faster than we were ready for and leaving other web tech­nolo­gies scram­bling to catch up. Com­peting com­pa­nies assem­bled a whole shooting gallery of web browsers that devel­opers had to target. And through all this, the artsy designers had to struggle, knowing the dif­fer­ence between suc­cess and failure online was under­standing how all these tech­nolo­gies defined the pos­si­bil­i­ties and lim­i­ta­tions of their creations.

Over time, the last straw was placed on the camel’s back. Human fac­tors engi­neering. Web pages evolved from dig­ital brochures and simple “Email me” forms into a world of inter­ac­tive appli­ca­tions. Jakob Nielsen and Edward Tufte became house­hold names for designers and web devel­opers trying to make the most user-friendly inter­ac­tive web­sites. Web­sites took us beyond simple show and tell and into dis­cuss, debate, share, argue, flame, pur­chase, rate, like, and friend. Huge amounts of data are now col­lected, manip­u­lated, mon­e­tized, dis­played, and inter­preted online for all manner of pur­poses. The holy grail of the web is the inter­linking of all of that data in to a kind of uni­versal knowl­edge. And someone needs to design a way to make it understandable.

Which brings us back, or for­ward, to HTML 5. For me, this – along with a few other things like jQuery – have brought us simul­ta­ne­ously back and for­ward into a dif­ferent age of inter­ac­tive design. The sta­bi­lizing influ­ence of HTML 4 is waning. Great ideas, user behav­iors and expec­ta­tions, new devices, and the demands of dig­ital mar­keting are pushing devel­opers to make use of every tool in the box, no matter how uni­ver­sally adopted. It reminds me of the ado­les­cence of the web, before Firefox and JavaScript libraries, where simple inter­ac­tivity involved addressing mul­tiple imple­men­ta­tions of the Doc­u­ment Object Model. Inter­ac­tive media devel­op­ment has become the domain of truly gifted com­puter sci­ence pro­fes­sionals and front-end engi­neers who have watched the web grow up from the infancy of <center> tags.

With the weight of the code lifted their shoul­ders, designers can focus on visual com­mu­ni­ca­tion and user inter­faces. But the gift of this most recent age of web design is that many of the lim­i­ta­tions that hin­dered our thinking have been removed. The tech­nology is so much more capable now. I’ve stopped telling clients that some­thing isn’t pos­sible. Most things are pos­sible. I can now be a designer and either tell them why an idea may or may not make good sense for the user or their brand and quote a price. And while there are cer­tainly some tech­nical limits to what we can dream up (just as with printed media), designers are much more free to dream and play and worry about what the devel­oper is going to say about the imple­men­ta­tion later. The most lim­iting factor is cost.

As a cre­ative pro­fes­sional who has occu­pied the DMZ between designers from coders, I have long hoped to vacate my some­times uncom­fort­able posi­tion and place both my feet firmly on on the side of Visual Com­mu­ni­ca­tion. I think that day is on it’s way. I’m sure I’ll visit the other side every now and then but it will be as an ambas­sador for my kind. I know where home is.