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I spent a good part of this morning watching John Berger’s 1972 television series Ways of Seeing (nod to Click Opera).

Ways of Seeing follows from a line of thought set forth in Walter Benjamin’s canonical 1936 essay, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Summarily, with the advent of art’s mechanical reproducibility, and the development of forms of art (such as film) in which there is no original, the experience of art is freed from place and ritual and instead brought under the gaze and control of a mass audience, leading to a shattering of the object d’art’s "aura" - its ability to produce awe and reverence in a viewer.

You must hurry to see this incredible show at YouTube while it is still available.

Here is a quote from Episode One of Ways of Seeing:

A large part of seeing depends upon habit and tradition.

As you look at [the paintings] now, on your screen, your wallpaper is around them. Your window is opposite them. Your carpet is below them. At this same moment, they are on many other screens, surrounded by different objects, different colors, different sounds. You are seeing them in the context
of your own life.

Once, all these paintings belonged to their own place…everything around (them) confirm(ed) and consolidate(d) (their) meaning.

I have questions, complicated questions. These include, "do awe and reverence actually somehow stem from uniqueness or originality?" and, "if ‘authenticity’ and even the existence of an original are off the table, does the kind of ritual that might produce an ‘aura’ reassert itself in some other way?" and, "can meaning be consolidated, or is that just a modernist myth?"

But, my friends, those are questions for another context. Here, let’s keep it simple, and talk briefly about what it means to design experiences that are, by definition, nomadic. I mean nomadic in the sense that they have no defined "place" that provides an experiential context - qua Berger, qua Benjamin. They will be surrounded by a potentially infinite number of windows and wallpaper (on-screen and off), carpets, pictures, in some cases they will be subject to the erratic whims of browser rendering engines, and always to the slightly-less-erratic whims of display drivers.

This means that your design will need to be created as part of an incredibly deep and disparate matrix of experience.

Which is yet another chance to impart one of our favorite lessons here at DLB: Keep it simple. Let’s look at the example of two incredibly popular and well-branded websites. Here’s netflix.com against two arbitrary desktop colors:

Note that Netflix’s famous red becomes almost bile-inducing in the context of the desktop on the right. Now, let’s take a look at Google:

The infamously simple Google front page stands up much better to our ugly, ugly desktop. Not only that, it worked with every color I tried. Why? Because white matches everything. And so does black.

Now the really incredible part. Google’s logo has reds in it that are almost exactly the same reds used on the Netflix site. And, because they are provided in page context which sufficiently couches them from the "great outdoors," and in reasonable quantities, they actually manage to work with the green color.

This is important, because I am not here espousing that you pitch black-and-white sites to your clients. I am espousing some restraint, and mindfulness of the wide variety of contexts in which your work will be presented. Q.E.D.