[thelist] Really bad design from an organisation that shouldknow better

[aardvark]

> From: Erika Meyer
>
> Though I'm not sure what you really mean by
> 'artist.'  Almost
> anything could be an art, couldn't it?  Even web
> design?  Or???

i was just trolling...

> Speaking for academia, they are always worried
> about funding, and
> most universities seem chronically underfunded in
> the web department.
> The PR offices  in many universities still
> haven't been able to deal
> with the WWW fully, perhaps because the academic
> higher ups have not
> been too quick to recognize the value of the web,
> nor the investment required to do it well.

see, i don't see that as the case, and if it is, it's
unfortunate...

when i was on the web crew at UB, it was an internship that
i applied to my media study degree... there were a bunch of
us (6?) giving maybe 10 hours a week at the office, and
plenty of research and experimentation time at home... we
had somebody directing us who helped keep us grounded...

and then there was the engineering dept., the CS dept.,
etc... fostering competition and stuff created some great
projects at minimal cost...

OT: i remember a discussion we had about creating all sorts
of cool web pages that fired off sounds and made your system
do stuff... they really wanted to do it and decided that
AppleScript run on the client-side was the best way... they
had no stats of PC vs. Mac users, and i was the only PC user
on staff, so they figured it couldn't be that many... too
bad, they thought, PC users really shouldn't be registering
online anyway...

however, smaller colleges, like the one at
http://hilbert.edu, don't have the creative or technical
departments from which to draw students, so then it does
have to come from a marketing budget...

> At lower levels, where stuff has to happen, the
> academic POV often
> is: 'The young 'uns know this computer stuff.
> Let's have a student
> design our site for work-study money!'  (or
> better yet, for free!
> They can turn it in for a 'class project.')

yep... that's it...

> Hows this for scary: a university art department
> site which was
> developed as a series of student projects?)
> http://www.humboldt.edu/~artdept/

wow... even the first cut of the media study department site
i did in 1995 was a *lot* better than this.... i love
looking at sites put out by digital art departments... lots
of bloat, little idea of UIs... add the graphic design dept
and you've got gif-text and filter-frenzy everywhere...