the web will starve to death

How do you make money on the web?

Without being a web business?

Ads?

Sure. It's just that people don't want them and will soon enough use technology to avoid it all.

Why?

Because we feel advertising messages are not crucial to us.
Not informative enough.
Or not hip enough, if that is our priority.

If we need to know what to to buy, we find it.
sure ads will still work. provided we "read" them.
So ads might be cool little movies. or t-shirts, out-door. or placement is great soprano-like shows.

We know one thing for sure. It's flexible.
And we can't rely on eyeballs on a show.
It's real. they people watching may ve totally numb to your product's appeal. Well, most likely they are.!!!!!

To me this is good news. It simply means that arteficial bullshit about showing the product exaclty 13 seconds into a spot is forever dead Fucking ravenous news.
That sort of fake crap will die and it will be rather apparent that nobody would want to warch a Yes washing powder spot twice.

At leat not a brainwash style one.

Yo be fucking honest.
I love it.
It means advertsiers's got to get real. I know. i know. So do ad agencies. But promise...the guys and dolls doing the ads long knew this.
It's really client-side, whatever people say.
and whatever a lot agencies claim, it's not a creative problem at all. Or a tech divide one.
Even people my age are totally web. we're like 80 or 90 years old. Oh, yeah, Clapton and Hendrix were my babies. I taught them all about the lose finger on the e-cord.
the t.

widgets, and the reality of ads online

widgets are the next territorial battle. how many widgets will we have time for? well, not widgets, but what's behind them.
widgets will be bit like radio frequencies. but we can keep them on our laptops, or under a widgets icon.
widgets will be the front-pages of our lives in some ways, to the stuff we like to check on often. like our favorite magazines used to be. or favorite radio and tv shows and sports channels and what not.

difference is that back when the printed paper magazine came out once a week, or bi-weekly, (well, still does, although living in singapore there were never such a thing as a magazine other than 8days, which one can live without, here in the states we have thousands) and the tv show appeared 9pm on thursdays or whatever, we may become more fickle, because we know we can catch it all whenever we want to, and thereby we may not catch it all. I"m not talking tivo, i'm talking tv and radio content over the web.

Me? I buy the paper version of New York Post, 25 cents, a rag, for a quick and easy read on the train into Manhattan. Most interesting shit is the NY political and mafia gossip. It keeps me in a new york state of mind, if you like. and tells me how the Mets or the Yankees did the night before.

New York Times, is a quality paper i've stopped buying. i read it for free online.
Same with all ad press. All free online. same with wired, american photography, etc. etc.
and actually, I bloody never click on any advertising on those sites.

the fact is that the web might be the biggest enemy of advertising. It doesn't work on the web. people ignore it. it's too intrusive even in its most benign form. to succeed you have to entice people to engage with your brand. And catching them when they're not up to something else, such as reading what's on the site, or watching the movie on web tv. and here's the hook. you can't catch them when not up to something else. The "surfer" is not inactive.

only if it is something you really need is it worthwhile to stop by for it. or if it seems really, really fun.
but not if you have to interrupt something else.

Interruption is dead I'm afraid. To stay for a moment on a pretty or clever print ad didn't feel like interruption. It didn't feel like a side track. To click on a banner is side tracking.
so it's easier to ignore even if it seems interesting. And it's totally annoying f it also tries to get your attention by blinking or something.

the reality is that you may be interested in a new loan, or a new car, or flowers for you boyfriend.
Either you do in fact know where the bank is, where the car dealer and flower shop are, or you go and search for it online. you don't need ads for that. not nowadays. well, you might click on ads when searching. that's the yellow pages, or the small page ads as we know them.

You may buy and read a fashion mag or car mag because you like fashion and cars. thereby the ads are fun too.
Same of course with sites on topic. difference is that on tv it was linear. you go and pee. in mags you flip the page as quickly as it appeared. on the net you have to make the choice. You won't. Because it's not organic. it's a discourse. Not as easy as simply lingering on a print ad, or not going to the loo during a tv show.

I think b2b is where online ads can really work. people need to know about the products out there, therefore b2b advertising online will work done right.

other than that, it's e-commerce, which may not always be the place people shop, but at least a shop window, if you see what I mean. You check out what Kenneth Cole might have this week, then you go to the store.
If you like it you might buy in the store, or you might go back home and order online, to save perhaps a few bucks, or because they didn't have the color or the size in the store. Stores and their sites live in a symbiosis.
however, you wont get that feeling of a nice shopping bag. some people like "catalogue shopping, some don't. and to some extent, it depends on where you live.

and what about vodka or soft-drinks? well, games, drink tips, humor?, some stuff worth going back to. but how.
outdoor is going to drive this.
and free or cheap tv channels on the web where ads are sparsely populated. however, you're not going to stop watching your film in order to click to a site url on the spot that appears in the middle of it to make it free.
Toys? this is where they've figured it out. Webkinz is a big deal. And it's all got to do with the internet.
By the way, when did you see an ad for Webkinz? They don't advertise. It's all in-store and word of mouth, not even web advertising.

i think advertising has to get real about it's effects.
We're about to experience a rude awakening.
If the truth comes out.
Everybody is totally naive about it today.

design for the screen

in the beginning it looked like shit. but was kind of hip because it was new.
so however inept the designer was,a s long as it was on the we bit was cool.
soon some tried to do this shit offline.
and where's online typography and design going now?
well,for a while there was this weird debate about web and screen typography.
kind of like what used to work in print wouldn't work on the screen.
It was true for a bit. the screen resolution was so crude that only the boldest ugliest crap would work anyway.
Thankfully we're back to some basics here.

Good typography is making a come back on the screen.

Old easy to read fonts such as Century Schoolbook just reads beautifully on screen.

Wired looks okay, easy to read, old fashioned type, if youy like. Looks totally modern though.
There are plenty of others going in that direction.

So young designers need to learn history again. I always maintained you need NOT start with knowing your history. I stress
it's better to start doing your own shit for a bit. Out of passion and interest. If the flame is with you after a while you will get curious, wanting to know more, and soon enough you start to get interested in the lineage. The heritage.

In time, we all need to understand and know our and Bodoni, Caslon, Baskerville, Plantin, Morris fuller Benton, Tschichold, Robert Black, Neville Brody, Fred Woodward, and many others, in no particular order, all brilliant designers and most of them type cutters. Ranging from the 16th century to almost modern times (like 20 years ago.)

Is there anything really that different from the old print days?
Well, not really. Not as far as legiblilty goes. No not with modern screens. Other than we might be more used to read more various typefaces as we've been exposed to a significantly greater variety of type than generations before us, which gives the typographer more freedom. What used to be hard to read 20 years ago, is now easier to read. We're trained.
That, however, doesn't give us less responsibility. I'd hate tosee type fall back into the gutter.
Type needs to be beautifully and carefully set and handled to look and read well. Whether it's a brutal no nonsense Railroad Gothic, the ubiquitous Helvetica or a fine Didot.

It is, still, all about good design.
Combined with interesting and intriguing ideas.

However, there's a little thing that is somewhat different on the screen compared to print; a touch that was never used that much in print, and still isn't. The shaded stuff. The graded stuff. The shadowed stuff.
It simply looks cheesy on fiber, but somewhat more modern and dimensional on the screen. Done right, carefully, not overly obvious, it works, like in the example form Apple above.

Well. As usual I was about to say, and said,, Apple gets it right. The design in the pix above, a slice of their site, could have been a page out of a brochure. Besides the careful grading.
It's a fresh and modern feeling web page.

If only all those great old media typographers and designers could embrace their screen, things would start to look fine.
Most sites look like crap.
We need the old media guys and gals to make this great.
tjey may not LIKE the fragmentation of stuff, but it doesn;t mean they don't get it if thew want. it doesn't mean they can't make it loom fantastic.Think if it this way.
You create a great game. Lot's of cool levels. Action, Stuff.
But if you can't get the carachters to look right you still don;'t have a good game.

Bring old schol and new school together. don't shy away form each other.
Old school agencies are too desperate hirting chief new technology officers , when they shoukd instead hir great ecnicians and have them work toegeth with great designers and evetybosy in between.
the chief new technology officer is coming forn the wronf end of the specrrum big fcking mistke if you ask mne. but the big old staid agencies are despreate, so they become dumb. Really dumb.
Goodby might be aqn old estsblished creative shop, but hey, ther are still creativeso they got it.
the Ogilvies of the world didn't. Even if their Toronto office manage to win some wrb accoladesfor the dove viral, for a campign thaqt was in facdt invented old school, by a german team, and then brought out by the london agency, adn of course consequently hi-jacked as the the great achievemnt of the Ny office. I doubt my old boss knew anything about this campaign before it beocme a success story.
I'm sure an honest Steve Hayden, of 1984 Apple fame, would agree, but he won;t because he's now big biz as well. (Love you man, nevertheless.)
Hey, the only guy not afraid to cuss and curse and gripe is George Parker of www.adscam.typepad.com fame
Either he's comfortably economically independent, although I doubt it as he lives in bloody Idaho, or he thinks he will die soon

Howanyfurtherwaymore.

The embarrassing fact is that if you randomly pick 100 sites and 100 magazines, the magazines would win hands down on most very aspect of design and content. Including photography, typography, legibility, navigation, and not least, as said content. (Yes, I know, wired has more or less, more really, of the same content online as offline, but still, their printed magazine works better, besides the fact that they can do some video online as well. But who the fuck needs video if it isn't terrifically great? As my friend George Tannenbaum (www.adaged.blogspot.com) says, nontent is not content.

I'd encourage the old guard to employ their skills to the computer screen.
There's no mystery about it.
Just bloody do it. And hey, all clients out there, don't think it's such a mystery, and don't think you need to be 12 years old to get it.

I guess an old pro like Lee Clow has something of a finger or more in this example of Apple's simple brilliance.
And most everything Apple does.