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No, Graphic Designers Aren't Ruining the Web

jamieforrest.com

11–15 of 15 posts

Re: No, Graphic Designers Aren't Ruining the Web

#12
Take a look at ad placement technology if you want a likely culprit for why any given website is making an excessive number of requests per-page-load. In addition to whatever resource is placed immediately onto the page (and the ultimate ad creative), most ad snippets also bring in tracking beacons, additional JavaScript and completely new documents. Designers have a part to play in this, but I would argue that lack of engineering innovation is at fault for the shameful state of ad placement technology today.

Re: No, Graphic Designers Aren't Ruining the Web

#13
Just one comment:

"Last I checked, “bandwidth” is an infinite resource..."

No it is not. There has to be infrastructure to carry that bandwidth, so there is a very real and physical limit on bandwidth. Also, in many countries, bandwidth costs money. Downloading costs money. I know that in America it is easy to find unlimited internet plans (or close to it), but in many countries every gigabyte you downloads costs money. My limit is 40 gigabytes, for which I pay about 40 dollars. After that, every 10 gigabytes I download is an additional 6 dollars.

Re: No, Graphic Designers Aren't Ruining the Web

#14

Just one comment: "Last I checked, “bandwidth” is an infinite resource..." No it is not. There has to be infrastructure to carry that bandwidth, so there is a very real and physical limit on bandwidth. Also, in many countries, bandwidth costs money. Downloading costs money. I know that in America it is easy to find unlimited internet plans (or close to it), but in many countries every gigabyte you downloads costs mon…

Prices for "mobile broadband dongles with data" in the UK. Surprisingly expensive, and they have Fair Use policies. A big plan would be 1 GB per month.

(http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3605265)

Re: No, Graphic Designers Aren't Ruining the Web

#15
Well, as a designer who does his best to understand his medium and make web pages load as cleanly as possible I can only agree with some of this.

As for my role as a designer, most of the decisions that are made as to what composes the website is not made by me. They are made by people above me in our company's chain-of-command. Most of these people have no idea what's involved in making a website but if I wish to continue receiving a paycheck I do what they say. I do try to educate them in some ways so that they can understand what's what but it doesn't always work out that way. Most of the things on the websites I work on that I do not necessarily like I can do nothing about, they are mostly marketing decisions.

Some of this hate towards designers can be spread around a bit more I think.

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