It takes about four minutes of reading The Elements of Typographic Style, or maybe one intro to typography class, or about half a day of thinking logically about information architecture to realize exactly why websites like The Huffington Post are the worst fucking thing to happen to news in a long time.

Before we get into nitpicking, let’s take a look at the grander problem: blogs are hard to maintain. Unlike print media, blogs and online information agencies need to be organized by a content management system, instead of say, an art director. And so while newspapers allow for a grid structure, where an art director and team of designers can utilize a canvas to create interesting layouts that will display information at a resolution appropriate to the reader, the internet is actually less dynamic in this sense. There are screen widths to consider, there is a lack of time to consider. There are typeface issues, with standard, cross-platform web fonts being minimal (and awful).

The New York Times has used 96 point type on the front page four times in history. One was when Obama was elected. The time before that was 9/11. They reserve this sort of thing for important events. But on The Huffington Post, giant ass headlines in huge, obtrusive and ugly Arial are posted consistently, no matter if it’s Tiger Woods fucking some new model or the NYSE taking a 800 point hit. Sometimes it’s color coded, but that’s not the point: it’s all the same.

And The Huffington Post isn’t the only site to blame. Media aggregates such as Gawker (and affiliates) have consistent streams of linked out content, and it could be anything, but it all visually is similar. And so to the mind of a reader, it all equates to the same thing.

Visual hierarchy, specifically within the realm of typography, is the greatest loss journalism (and information architecture in general) is losing in spades with the transition to the internet. Due to the need to run all modern websites through a CMS, only The New York Times does any sort of attempt to make some headlines greater than others, feature some stories moreso than others (because really, it should be expected of them).

This problem becomes more significant due to the way in which people interact with the internet. Pages aren’t turned, and rarely clicked on. People expect all information to be displayed in front of them, as opposed to in a newspaper where sections are designated and the medium constitutes a relationship of turning pages, folding them, and moving from section to section. The internet, in haste to show how valuable a tool it is to display information, has colluded the mind to believing all prominent information is displayed immediately on the front page. As if it wasn’t hard enough to find pertinent news before this, now anything that gets posted in non-front page sections will be consistently lost. The action of clicking “Arts” on an online newspaper would be the same as clicking back to your homepage, switching to an IM, or closing the browser. This is far different than print, because to read the arts section, you pick it up. To check your mail, you get up and go to the mailbox.

Our physical actions, and the priorities to which we put them and the way to which we organize our lives through them, are being replaced, and worse, associated with one another. Keeping up with people you don’t know is the same action as keeping up with those you do, via Facebook; in the real world, it means being a peeping tom versus writing a letter or making a phone call. These are important differences.

It always saddens me to see the world fall into this cave of static, especially considering the uphill battle graphic designers everywhere fought through the ages to make typography relevant to the public discourse. But I wonder what impact this all will have on us as an international culture, and how we’ll start treating things equally, even when they don’t deserve to be, but in all the information available online, nobody thought to typeset it.

It wasn’t that many years ago that major websites started adopting 990 pixel wide web layouts. It wasn’t until this year that I did, given that there are still a few users out there who use 800×600 screen resolution. But five years ago, 1024×768 became the lowest resolution on new monitors.

But now there is such a diversity of screen resolutions (I think my 27″ iMac at work has 2560×1440 while my two monitors at home are each stuck at 1280×1024) that it’s creating difficulty to maintain any sort of visual standard. This is one of the examples as to why print will always be better than web/digital design – control of the environment and therefore the ability to have a structure to visual communication (even if your effort at that point is to destroy the structure).

This was, up until recently, one of the bigger problems facing designers trying to adapt to the idea of aesthetics on the web. Yesterday, in trying to design a new page at work that will primarily target iPad users, I realized that this stupid device has just screwed up web design probably more than screen resolution did.

The lack of a mouse means things like rollover status, opacity, image hotspots and many tools that utilize the interaction of a scrolling environment are completely useless on an iPad. You can’t roll over a link anymore, because you tap links, so hover status is irrelevant. The way people interact with the web on a touchscreen device is a completely different experience and therefore a lot of fun little tricks that have been developed in visual communication have now been rendered … well, tricky.

Apple is releasing a trackpad, but I’ve used their mighty magic mouse (or whatever it is) and it fucks up a lot by accidentally hitting a side of the mouse. These devices are easy to use for checking your email, but intensive computer use requires precise tools – mice, keyboards. Tactile response to things.

So now we have a more fucked up web, and Apple’s touting of HTML5 and CSS3 is pretty ridiculous considering all the aspects of each the iPad renders useless. Certainly, at some point and time in the future, there will be a new standard environment for design. As for now, the internet can go fuck itself and print should live forever.

It’s sometimes hard to explain to people why things matter until after something is done wrong and there’s a pretty obvious example. This is a good case in point as to why page placement matter.

For the most part, I like how the ad turned out. But in the process of early concept sketches, I asked for verification on which side page of the spread we were going to be given, because that impacts the layout. Word came back we had a right hand page.

Of course to a lot of people, perhaps, such a question would seem ridiculous. But look at the ad as it is on the left page, being designed for the right: the guy seems like he’s crowding the girl into a wall as opposed to opening up a conversation. The bar is now falling off the page instead of being anchored into the stable spine, and there’s someone who, instead of being a face in a shadow is now falling off the left corner.

Basically, the entire visual dynamic has changed. I designed this imagining an visual weight equal to what I was doing to counter and hold the page on the left side, so the upward-right visual projection would make your eye return to the center of the page and the tag line after reading the headline.

And because someone got a single question wrong, now I don’t have as impressive of a portfolio piece. And things that are out of my control like this just make me crazy.