The PrintShop moment
Anybody remember
Print Shop on the Commodore 64? In the '80s, Print Shop and software like it revolutionized the way we produced local documents. Newsletters, lost pet posters, banners in the high school gym -- things that used to be done on hand or typed and mimeographed could suddenly be done on our own computers, complete with different fonts and clip art. The results, of course, were absolutely horrendous: people with absolutely no design training took up simulated tools of graphic designers, producing documents with so many fonts that they looked like ransom notes. But things got better.
Let's call this the Print Shop moment -- the point at which a new technology gives the broad public access to tools once considered the domain of a specific profession, resulting in an explosion of artifacts. Most of these artifacts will be badly produced, but a few will be genuine innovations, and the artifacts will eventually regain regularity as the public acquires a more discriminating eye (and templates). The Print Shop moment for desktop publishing was in the 1980s. The Print Shop moment for websites was, say, 1993-1998. The Print Shop moment for blogs started a couple of years ago and we're at the tail end of it. So what's next?
The pressure to make sites accessibility-compliant; the trend toward centrally organized sites; the raised bar on web features, including searches and archiving; the proliferation of appropriate, often free software with good CSS support and plenty of templates; and the potential to move away from the detail work of coding and toward large-scale information design and application design. These factors will all move us away from website design and towards content management systems -- the next Print Shop moment.
After that? True, powerful, and widespread
end-user programming.
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Clay
Posted by at May 28, 2004 12:47 PM
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