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The Future of the Web
Web design and technologies are constantly evolving. They evolve so fast that it’s part of a designers job description to be able to keep up with these new technologies. There are few things things that I would like to see change in the future regarding web design. One, typography techniques need to be expanded. Two, social media needs to become integrated. Three, mobile devices need to be standardized. Finally four, browsers need to realize their full potential. These aren’t commands upon the web industry. Rather subtle suggestions or ideas that would make my life, and every other designers life a little less frustrating and a lot more exciting.
Web Typography
Web typography has been beaten to a pulp in discussion, techniques, blogs, magazines, the world over, so it is no ground breaking subject. Web design and web sites can be works of art and it’s a shame to see the same six or seven fonts used over and over again. Granted, fonts like Helvetica and Times New Roman are standard for a reason, they are beautiful, but branding and design is choked back by this limitation and design concepts aren’t able to flourish into the would-be-beauty’s that they potentially could be. But, there are ground breaking things going on in the industry that make web typography a hot topic for the future.
@font-face seems to be all the new rage, with sites like Typekit pioneering the art of font replacement in css styles. Yet, there are still a few kinks that need to be worked out with this technique. Number one, standard fonts, that are used just as often as Times New Roman and Helvetica, like Garamond and Univers, can not be embedded into the @font-face replacement. I am not quite sure the reasons behind this, probably licensing and legal issues, but until I can use Trade Gothic Condensed Bold No. Twenty for my h2 tags, @font-face fails to satisfy my typographic hunger in web design. A
Another reason I hesitate to incorporate @font-face into my designs is that it uses JavaScript to embed the fonts. This is no different from any other font replacement technique on the web right now. The drawback to using JavaScript for typography is that some people don’t enable JavaScript on their browsers. It pains me to use this as a reason but, until JavaScript becomes a household name, @font-face and Cufon cease to solve the problem.
Cufon is another clever, “almost there”, font-replacement technique that is on the brink of being what I am looking for. It also uses JavaScript but in a different way. It uses selectors to replace that text with rendered images of the embedded font. Unlike @font-face, Cufon allows any TrueType font to be used to replace text. Downsides? Yes, it’s not all peachy. The image replacement technique has a few quirks that are hard to work around. Line-height becomes and issue when using Cufon. Some fonts don’t allow for the adjustment of line-height in the CSS styles, and when you are using Cufon to make the typography on your site impeccable, it’s impossible when the line-height doesn’t respond to your styling. Another drawback is link rollovers don’t respond to Cufon targeted selectors. This doesn’t bode well for a sweet navigation menu using Swiss 71a with a hover effect and the hover effect doesn’t appear.
There are more image replacement scripts out there and tons of free @font-face fonts out there to use but they all have their similar degrees of issues. An idea for the future is to maybe have an online foundry of fonts that designers can draw from and when a user visits their site, it activates that font. Sounds similar to Typekit right? Well, maybe use php instead of JavaScript to send the activation back and forth. Or, browsers allow designers to include a font in their directory and that font becomes activated on a visitors computer when visiting a particular site. Both of the suggestions for the future are vague and not researched but until JavaScript is eliminated, and new web safe fonts become available, web typography will be a battle for every designers in the future.
Social Media
Another aspect of web design that has been revolutionized in the past decade is social media. Everyone is online and on Facebook and/or Twitter. They have become an integral part of social and professional communication. Every respectable business tweets and has a facebook fan page, and don’t forget about a domain name. So why so many different places for relatively the same thing? It’s a good question. The future holds an exciting possibility that Smashing Magazine recently wrote an article about. Holistic Web Browsing is a unique idea that holds a lot of weight.
As far as one person having a hundred different places to find information about them, what if one site was like a personal url where all of that information could be pulled in by an API or similar source. Instead of going to facebook, LinkedIN, Flickr, Twitter, Last.FM… you get the point, you got to www.facebook.com/uniqueid and boom, there it is. Everything you used to have to look for across plethora’s of social sites is now in one convenient location. This is not to say facebook and twitter become insignificant in the future, well maybe a little, but like any revolutionary web based application, it always takes a little while to catch on and never completely eliminates the competition. People would still be able to access their info on other sites and not even use them if they wanted, this site would be a sort of yellow pages for the internet.
Holistic Web Browsing
Keeping with the Holistic Web Browsing idea in mind, what if web browsers became the operating system for your computer. The web is becoming faster and more powerful everyday. You can run apps from it and access it from a cell phone on a subway in Timbuktu. So what if it became the source of everything you do on your computer, and instead of having a tab open for each different window, your desktop background would just be the Google homepage. I think that would be a good look. Regardless, instead of having a bookmark bar and a thousand tabs open on your browser, url’s would run as applications from your desktop just as your Mac Mail does when you click on it. It would be the same size but now, going back to that yellow pages of the internet idea, you could find every email address you ever wanted to find would be right in your contacts. Every Photoshop action or illustrator brush you used to download from the web would now be already installed.
Yes, it’s a delusion of grandeur and seems a little impossible but, hey, it’s the future.
Karen
Interesting take… a lot of grammatical errors though. You really need to proof read your posts.