Making the Case for an Independent Web

Part Two of Two

Last week, I was lucky enough to see Amy Goodman speak at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She and the other speakers made an impassioned case for the importance of independent media: film, radio, books, and other forms of journalistic storytelling. What is interesting is that the open source and free software movements share very similar goals and ideologies to independent media creators, but their points of intersection are few. When tech and indie media do come together, it tends to happen because a particular talented individual possesses multiple sets of skills (for instance, is both a musician and a programmer) and not because there are formal or informal communities organized to facilitate these interactions.

Gutenberg Printing Press –  Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Our sponsoring organization, 119 Gallery of Lowell, MA, provides a place-based, experiential model for bridging this divide.

My company, Yes Exactly experiences the divide somewhat differently — in the form of artists, journalists, and other independent culture creators coming to us in search of affordable, professional websites. In our first years of operation, this was pretty much our niche. I was able to create a simple framework that worked to create  unique, aesthetically pleasing sites that did not require a lot of custom programming — however, as we grew, I found that designers who were not themselves programmers required more structure and better ability to preview their work. Hence, the Thematizer.

Our company was built on open-source technology (primarily WordPress and Drupal), so we felt it was time to give something back. We decided to go ahead and build something that would make the web a more interesting, aesthetically pleasing, and usable place. Something that would make it just as easy to create a custom design using open-source platforms as using corporate, proprietary software. Something that would give independent artists and businesses a vital tool to compete and communicate in the online world — even against much bigger, better-funded players.

If we’re successful, our competition will be using this tool too. And we’re fine with that. In fact, it’s a benchmark of our success.

Making the Case for an Independent Web

Part One of Two

I had the opportunity to sit down with a reporter from a local paper yesterday and do an interview about Thematizer. I had some talking points thought out ahead of time, but when you’re in the moment and you’re trying to answer somebody’s questions, prepared nuggets of information don’t quite seem to cut it.

The big question I keep coming back to, for somebody who is not computer-literate or all that familiar with the web, is why building another software tool is important. After all, we’re drowning in information already — for-profit, not-for-profit, proprietary, open-source. Our options for apps, editors, and interactive experiences seem at first glance limitless.

Venture a little further into the world of code and you will discover that there are a finite number of languages and toolsets applied for the vast majority of development projects. You will also discover that expert visual designers and user experience professionals are sought after as much so, and often more so, than top programmers. What’s more — although there are approximately 260,000 graphic design jobs in the United States and 343,700 computer science jobs — most graphic designers are not trained to design for the web, but work instead in the shrinking, economically imperiled print sector.

The end result is that to build an original application that looks really good and is full-featured and usable, you need a large budget. In fact, you are probably working for an advertising agency or a large corporation. Meanwhile, thousands of recent graduates have have fabulous graphics skills but no way to interface directly with programmers. The process of working together, when tried at all, feels like pulling teeth. The two professions simply do not know how to communicate the information that helps them both to do their jobs.

Web development is a new field, so the methods and processes for collaboration that we see in art forms like film or music simply have not had time to evolve.

If graphic designers and programmers are not able to talk to each other, tomorrow’s online spaces will be built largely to corporate specifications. Concerns about privacy and freedom of expression can mostly go out the window. Opportunities for creativity and risk taking will also diminish. Open-source web platforms like WordPress and Drupal that are geared toward end users will find themselves at a disadvantage, as graphic designers jump ship for proprietary platforms that offer the promise of custom design.

Thematizer will make it easy to build a great, custom look-and-feel for a Drupal or WordPress website — with about the same time and effort that is required to produce an original design for a concert poster, an album cover, or a business card. Designers understand these media because they are physical and bounded. They know the rules: where the margins and the bleeds lie, what they cannot and cannot do, what will result in tripling the cost of the final job, and what will save the client money. Until now, gleaning the same information about a web design in progress has required either an existing programming background advanced psychic skills — designers are typically given no parameters at all, and then criticized when the design they propose turns out to be time consuming or unwieldy to implement.

Unlike do-it-yourself web design tools, Thematizer makes it easier for designers and programmers to collaborate directly. Hence, art meets code. Because the templates that designers use are themselves open source, developers can modify the code if a different feature set or layout is desired, or to support additional templates such as new implementation on a mobile device. Because Thematizer templates generate clean, editable CSS, developers can make small changes to the design quickly and on the fly, without having to wade through bulky, difficult-to-read auto-generated markup of the type typically generated by commercial visual web editors (WYSIWYGS) such as DreamWeaver.

At the very least, our goal is to build neat tools to download that will make building visually interesting websites easier and a lot more fun. If we do our jobs right, then we’ll also get people talking to each other.