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Soul Sacrifice

December 01, 2002 / 8:06 p.m.

Yeah, that's right, I'm posting this like five minutes after my last entry.

I am morally against Gif89 Animation. Seriously. Never use it on your page. It is outdated and visually offensive. I mean, even though I don't even have the slightest clue how to begin using it, Flash is where it's at, man. I hate looking at pages with little animated spinning pinwheels or smiling cats or anything else remotely cutesy. That's the problem with Gif Animation: it looks like animation in the classical sense of the word, it looks like a cartoon. And really, it looks hideous. Especially when you have more than one on your page.

What has started this is clauren's diary. I'm sorry, dear, if you trace this back to this page via your site meter or something, but this is a very visually offensive page. There is so much going on it gives me a headache (not to mention slows down my computer considerably). One's layout should not induce vomitting in one's visitors. I'm sure you meant well, and I know you have tried your darndest to design a nice page, but all those animations have got to go. I'm serious. It makes your diary hard to look at.

And the thing about the internet is that it's so avante garde etc. that it shouldn't be a static medium. I applaud movement on a webpage; anything that is not static is fabulous. As burgeoning designers, we should embrace unböring design and do away with static HTML pages.

But not for diaries or blogs or what have you. These things are fundamentally based on content and when you sacrifice the ability of your viewer to get to the content based on your visually offensive animation-based design, you are compromising the point of your diary. These diaries are static for a reason. They're easier to load, easier to design, and easier to view. It's about content, folks, and excessive animations take away from that.

And if you absolutely insist upon having animations on your page, keep them few and far between. They're distracting, pure and simple, and very rarely add anything of relevance to your page. That is all.

Wow, I didn't think this would turn into a blog design manifesto.

The song of the day is "Soul Sacrifice" (the Woodstock version) by Santana.

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