Digitization and the (Vanishing) Arts of the Book

“Indeed, fifteen years into the ever wonderful, ever widening
world of the Web, we are treated to hideously cluttered home pages
at news sites that seek to cram as many topics onto a single screen
as are spread across the first two sections of a newspaper. Even
the stylish New Yorker, which has lovingly preserved its original
type faces and layouts in its print edition with few changes (and
those of equal flair) throughout its near-century of existence,
presents an on-line cover to the world that would send founding
editor Harold Ross into an apoplectic fit. And this despite the
fact that it is a destination site, with no need to act as a Google
magnet, or any reason to fear that visitors will refuse to invest
an extra click to take them another page deeper into the riches
they have arrived to enjoy.

“Worst of all, of course, is Google, whose Spartan presentation
(calling it a style would be oxymoronic) takes the functional
beyond austere to the brutally mechanistic. Try any search at the
Google home page and the results will make your eyes ache. The only
tiny concessions to the concept of graphic design are the corporate
logo, and the pale blue divider bar spanning the top of the page.
Nothing, it seems, can compare in priority to appeasing the god of
fast loading speeds, or rise to the visual importance of the raw
display of data.”

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