Future of web design

How will web design change as it "matures"? One trend is clearly to emphasize perceptual media. Designs will feature more graphics, sound, and video, and they will do so at the expense of verbal text. We have already seen this trend in standalone multimedia, where text is used primarily to identify buttons. The extensive use of words in multimedia is regarded as an admission of failure: the designer did not have a picture or could not afford video, so she resorted to text. The World Wide Web has not yet reached that point, largely because the Web grows out of such textual applications as email and newgroups. However, the apparent immediacy of pictures is irresistible. Email will ultimately be replaced by video conferencing, newsgroups by on-demand video clips (for which CNN at Work is an early prototype).


The gradual abandonment of verbal text means that we will have to rethink the whole notion of persuasion. Authors on the web will need a visual rhetoric to replace traditional verbal rhetoric. The visual rhetoric can proceed in two directions. It can strive for (photo)realism. Or it can aim for an ironic distance. We see examples of both trends, for example, in contemporary television (photorealism in the news shows and in "serious" television drama and irony in counterculture TV like the Simpsons). We see examples of both trends in advertising for television and for print. We will see both in web design.