Jessica Helfand, "A Flock of Ducks: Design and the New Webbed Utopia." Print, 49:3 (May/June 1995) 98-101.


I'm spending the day in an executive board room on the outskirts of Washington, DC, consulting with a client about the design of an internet web site. For six hours we brainstorm about models. What are the conceptual dimensions of this new space? I offer excerpts from my list-in-progress, made up of observations that suggest what I believe to be a more intriguing direction: among them, an advent calendar (the peek-a-boo dynamic of clicking on links just to see where they go); a stationery bicycle (the playful duality of travelling while standing still); a bathroom wall (the participatory quality of a graffiti free-for-all) to name a few.

I am faced with visualizing the concept of building this place, an aesthetic--and increasingly psychological--challenge. I imagine castles and caverns, great ziggurat-like towers of modular rooms fulfilling the unimaginably diverse needs of a million fictional net-surfers. What sort of place is this that we are inventing? And what criteria can we adequately rely upon to do so?

And most of all, if we build it--will they come?

Conceptually, this is as much a problem of city planning as one of information design. We are faced with the task of initiating construction in an environment that has no prevailing vernacular. I have an image in my mind of an architecture that sits on a flat plain, barren and empty, summoned by the click of a mouse before springing miraculously to life--much the way Dorothy's hallucinatory spin takes her from black and white to technicolor in The Wizard of Oz. Except that here, there's no point of departure, no landscape to refer to, no neighboring buildings to respond to, nothing but the promise of extensively networked phone lines to support the anticipated emergence of this new utopian culture.

It's a mild, December evening as the taxi winds its way down Massachusetts Avenue enroute to Union Station. We pass The American University, The Bolivian Embassy, The Ritz Carlton. Lights from second floor windows reveal wood-panelled libraries and cubicled offices, shutters and chandeliers. Why can't my web site look like this? I want draping flags and limousines, the drama of an illuminated doorway, asphalt and tumult, depth and dimension.

Yet unlike the world we inhabit, the Web knows no drama or scale. Here, variety is reserved for rapidly changing content, while form is by necessity restricted by what is technologically permissable: the carrying capacity of data lines (more commonly referred to as bandwidth) has yet to meet the promise of internet hopefuls who boast full frame, full motion, full tilt experience. For now, this means Quicktime in microscopic scale. Interlaced images (the ones that flow in as though filtered through venetian blinds.); One typeface (Times Roman) in 3 sizes (small, medium and large); and an unfortunate convention for designating hyperlinks, in which the linked word or phrase is in color (the default is blue), and bold, and underlined.

This color/bold/underlined belt-and-suspenders approach to design is a standard feature on the Web, thanks to the group of forward thinking, though typographically malnourished scientists at the University of Illinois who invented Mosaic. Unfortunately, these early design decisions quickly become standard conventions, difficult to challenge or alter, and virtually impossible to reject: thus, the legacy of the thin blue line will endure beyond software upgrades and data acceleration. It will become as intractable a feature of the Web as are folders and trashcan icons on the Macintosh desktop. And ultimately, such restrictions breed a sameness which is perhaps the greatest dilemma for design as it seeks to define itself in this new world.

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