Globalization and Its Impact on Website Graphic Design
Posted by: Octavio Marquez on 7/21/2008 3:11:26 PM
There used to be a World of different design schools, each of them proud of their own roots and achievements. But "living in a global village” as Mcluhan would say, we are on the best course towards losing our identity.
For many years now I have been collecting books about art and design. I have found that both passionate and nurturing. I see learning as an integral part of my work and being able to relate to those books that are on the shelves behind me is a very comforting feeling. I like to browse through them and to take time doing it. It makes me feel good. And it makes me think like no other form of media does.
There was a time when there were books only. You traveled abroad because you wanted to learn about other cultures. You walked into a bookshop in London and felt that you could spend a whole life there. Then, you chose a couple of books you can afford (the ones I liked were always the most expensive ones) and that’s it until, probably next year. That’s how I learned about Scandinavian, Italian or North American design in the first place.
By sheer circumstances, I found myself, later on, living in one of the most beautiful cities in the world for a good part of my life when passion towards design and everything around it became the essence of my life.
It was in Barcelona where I truly started discovering challenges of graphic design. I learnt from books, from people I was related to and the most from the projects I worked on. I learnt from everything all the time. At the beginning of the eighties satellite dishes were everywhere. It was really ugly but thanks to them we had a first hint of what was about to come with the Internet. We could see TV programs we have never seen before from around the world and savor different aesthetics. We could judge them, compare them, love them or hate them. And, I can say it now; the most beautiful thing of all was that they were all different.
The BBC was very different from CNN. Polish, Hungarian and Russian TV stations were as original as their folklore or food. Some of them looked better, some worse, but then again, that was the whole point.
As time went by, the satellite dishes were substituted with cable and wireless devices. The Internet brought a whole world onto our computer screens and, voila, in less than ten years, the whole world looks exactly the same.
Suddenly, different design schools vanished. No more design made in Madrid or Barcelona, London or Miami. The only thing that differs is the language. Everything else looks alike. Global design triumphed (whatever that meant). Which is extremely sad and disappointing. Now the worse is yet to come. Like cheap design, for instance - we have experienced that our clients sometimes come up with very specific requirements – like "I like my competitors site and I want my website to have the same look and feel” - hmmm, nice, isn’t that something.
I guess we are used to the - I like it – I want it - philosophy. It is about how we chose our company, our clothes, our food, drinks, a house, and a car. Why not a website? Downhill is obvious – it looks so easy to copy someone’s idea, and as a matter of fact it is, and by being so easy and feasible, it can’t be expensive either, right?
Hello guys, how about intellectual property, and fair play? Or, the second worse consequence of all of that - a whole generation of so called graphic designers that skipped everything that can be seen and learnt in real life and from the age of fourteen claimed to be an army of computer wizards whose prime goal is to reshape the world based on plagiarism.
The saddest thing is that we have such powerful tools and the Internet is so huge, that it will take a long time before things settled down the right way.
If ever…
