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I’m a web designer-developer. Studying at NYU Interactive Media Arts. On leave, working on climate at Watershed.

buyers are increasingly expecting a ‘B2C’ experience where they autonomously shop and your site ‘knows’ them.

Meticulously detailed icons became the thing. The Icon Factory were at the peak of their game making bespoke icon sets.

Every backdrop was generic and crisp: the scrubbed tech-compound where Gemma (Allison Williams) works; the bland, Wayfair-decorated house she lives in; the clean, non-specific streets she drives on. I thought little of this while watching. The movie looked expensive and professional, or at least had the hallmarks of those things: glossy, filtered, smooth. Only after it ended did it occur to me that it seemed, like so many other contemporary movies and shows, to exist in a phony parallel universe we’ve come to accept as relevant to our own.

As the site of consumer engagement transitioned from print to web in the mid- to late-2000s, many brands found themselves with identity systems that were unequipped for the technical constraints of the web at the time, which lacked broad device compatibility, support for responsive design, or opportunities for nuanced customization.

iPad.

PragerU can upload videos on a daily basis that aren't quite true, but videos that debunk them are going to be longer, slower, and less snappy. Getting bogged down in facts loses people quickly, especially when the facts are emotionally unsatisfying or complex.

Part of TikTok’s excitement is seeing a new video start and trying to figure out what the hell it is. That usually becomes clear within a few seconds; the pattern-matching process mirrors the instant recognition that enables efficient channel surfing. We may train the TikTok algorithm to give us what we like, but the algorithm also trains us to expect its identifiable categories of output.TikTok’s content and form both reflect something that is increasingly true about the internet: It is becoming more like TV.

Instagram’s announcement validated the strategic value of both TikTok-style algorithmic passivity and the creator economy’s professionalization of content production. It was social media finally collapsing on itself. After all, the worst part of Facebook was that your feed was always full of your actual friends’ chaotic drivel, and the best part of TikTok is that your friends have nothing to do with what shows up on your screen (Instagram and Twitter, meanwhile, are somewhere between those two extremes).

have worked for myself over the 25+ years since, and similarly straddled design and development up until recently.Something I've found challenging is that in my projects and pricepoints, it's felt like there is no time for craft. Always harried, always spread thin. Never enough budget to do much more than burn through code. And working with clients who barely know what they expect, so it's hard to confidently spend time on design polish while the chance of concepts being rejected on a whim seems quite random.

To a layman like myself technology seems to have slowed in its advance over the last few decades, with intellectual and financial resources that once turned out revolutions in agriculture, medicine, transportation, and energy now pooled mostly into computing. It seems as if attention shifted away from the “world of atoms” and into the “world of bits.”

So, the lesson is that when you run into an entrenched competitor with deep pockets who has essentially achieved regulatory capture of the corrupt legislators then you must be prepared to mount a counter campaign straight to the voters. It can be super expensive, but is definitely required in such situations.