News & Comment

 
...the world sees this on a PC
Before you make any assumptions, let me say upfront that I love Macs. I bought my first (128K RAM, 9" B&W screen) in 1985. I now own four (a mint-condition 512Ke, Centris 610, PowerMac 8600, G3 Powerbook). This website is created on a Mac. So what's the problem?

The problem is that I'm in a small minority, as are you if you're reading this on a Mac. The colors you & I see appear somewhat lighter than they do on a PC monitor. The text you & I read looks about 30% larger to someone using a PC. And the reality is that virtually everyone but us IS using a PC.

32% of the visitors to this website, mostly designers & design educators, use Macs. This has held steady for the last 6 months.

What about on the Web overall: how many people use Macs?

The answer is c) 2%.

(Statistics from 500,000 websites provided by theCounter.com)

EYES WIDE SHUT?
This has to have implications for us as designers, unless we choose to ignore it. At the very least it makes our job a little harder because we constantly have to check to see that our images look as good on the PC as the do on the Mac. We need to check how the text flows on both platforms since larger text can wreak havoc with our carefully planned line breaks.

This came home to me last week as I lectured my Web Design students on the importance of designing for both Windows & Mac systems. I told them to be sure that their work looks good on the PC, since most of the world sees it that way. Then I looked around the lab I was teaching in. All Macs. No PCs. Not one. How seriously should a student take my comments when we don't even have a single PC for them to use in the lab?

The problem doesn't only affect web design, though that's where it's most obvious. It also comes up when we develop interactive presentations using Macromedia Director. We can make self-running projectors so that anyone with a Mac can experience our work. But without a PC running a Windows version of Director we can't make something to show the PC world: most of our friends, families, and potential employers.

This month's banner
The banner graphic is a detail of a wall under a bridge in Cleveland's Flats area. The place has been used as a parking lot, and over the years the owners painted numbers to indicate spaces, and changed their minds from time to time. The patterns that developed are as interesting to me as much of what I've seen in museums. The bridge was recently repainted a nice light gray. Tidy. Boring.

Student project
Added to [EDUCATION] this month is the description of a project students recently completed in a basic Web Design class at Cleveland State. With the kind permission of its author (Nathan Shedroff of vivid studios), students re-designed the online article Seduction? In the Website?

Three of the more successful solutions are shown, each demonstrating a very different approach to the subject material.

Announcements
Also in [EDUCATION] check for announcements of job openings in Interactive / New Media education, and information and deadlines for competitions, especially those with student categories.

If you have news in either category that you'd like to share with the 1000+ visitors who come to Interactive Design Forum each month, use the email link below to send it to me.

                                      - Al Wasco 4/2/00

Tell a friend or colleague
It's easy to tell your friends about Interactive Design Forum: send their email address(es) to feedback@awdsgn.com and we'll add them to our email list for a monthly update message. Or just click on the Recommend-It icon at left to generate an automatic email message right now.

[Top]  |  [HOME]  |  [ABOUT this site]  |  [Email]