A-Bay O-Kay
I’ve just arrived in Arugam Bay, one of the east-coast Sri Lankan villages so badly hit by the Boxing Day tidal surge, and I don’t think I’ve ever been so shocked. It’ll be a couple of weeks before I get home and upload my photos, but in the meantime it might suffice to say tthat the children of A-Bay are being schooled under a parachute anchored to half of a ruined school building (resembling nothing quite so much as a London terrace after the Blitz), and that the loyal staff of the Stardust Beach Hotel worked deep into the night last night, as they must have done every night for months, mixing concrete, thatching the rooves of new cabanas, and planting hardy shrubs in the poisoned earth. It’s good to be here, to see.
July 28, 2005 04:16 PM | Comments(0)
My Hair is Great in Colombo
For the next four weeks, I’m on holiday in sunny (well, overcast) Sri Lanka. For this period, I will be relaxing, reading books, eating rice and curry, and enjoying an endless string of good hair days, thanks to the humidity and pollution.
July 19, 2005 03:08 PM | Comments(0)
That Was Then
"Under no circumstances will a Howard government create a wages system that will cause the take-home pay of Australians to be cut. Under a Howard government you cannot be worse off, but you can be better off. I give this rock-solid guarantee that our policy will not cause a cut in the take-home pay of Australian workers."
- John Winston Howard, 1996
July 7, 2005 06:21 PM | Comments(1)
Debt-Free and Pissed Off
I just paid off my HECS. I'd planned to emigrate before doing that, but, well, I didn't get around to it. I no longer owe the Commonwealth a cent; I can feel free to resent having paid for my education without an ounce of hypocrisy.
July 5, 2005 04:00 PM | Comments(2)
Splitsville
A couple of weeks ago, I was in a meeting with a client trying to explain why a content management system would be a better option for their business’s new website than a series of static HTML pages. I trotted out the standard stuff: “It’ll make future redesigns so much easier” and “You don’t need to stuff around with Dreamweaver” and “Weee, databases, shabang!”
The client looked puzzled, and eventually (using magic) I determined that her puzzlement derived from the concept of separating the site’s content from its design. As she sees it, there’s something important - if extrinsic - in the WAY content is presented, and although it might be theoretically useful to be able to redesign a website without touching the content, it’s probably not always practically useful. After all, this client has been producing reports and newsletters and working documents for many years, and hasn’t ever felt the need to apply a redesign of her company styleguide retrospectively. The old stuff looks like old stuff, and that’s, well, fine.
This led me to think about my own redesign fantasy, which I entertain in the form of pencil sketches on the backs of bank slips. I’m a designer. The design of my site says something about me - about my tastes, my skills, my strengths, my weaknesses, my stage of life. Just as eight year-old Virginia’s handwriting says, very clearly, “this diary is the work of a precocious ten year-old”, the site aesthetic places its content in a distinct personal-historical context. Even if I maintain an archive of previous designs on my site, I’m unlikely to show the posts in their original design context. It’s technically possible, but it goes against the spirit of the software that I use. For non-designers - people who choose a blog layout from a list of options - there’s still some value in preserving the fact that a choice was made. “Ah, those posts were written in my Pink Phase.”
Disregarding the sentimental reasons for doing so, maintaining a strong link between content and presentation in a corporate or business environment is probably also sound. The ‘About This Company’ page should (obviously) keep pace with any site redesigns, but it should also reflect current company policy on the use of language, the recent history of the company and so on. A website redesign offers the perfect opportunity to revisit and refresh website content.
Of course, none of these things is an argument against the semantic separation of content and presentation, or using a content management system - it’s just an observation that one of design’s crucial roles is to illuminate text in some way, and in attempting to make the management of the two things simpler, we have to be careful not to sever the meaningful link between them.
July 1, 2005 11:09 AM | Comments(1)
