Something Different: Sites That Push the Envelope

by Heather Champ

Sometimes I forget what the Web was like before the land grab of mass media--a time when you would ferret out "cool sites" by scrolling to the bottom of an individual's home page to a list of links, and surf from site to site, bookmarking those of merit and springboarding to others from those that weren't. Interesting sites spread through word of mouth or word of e-mail or, more typically, were found quite by chance.

Now a URL seems to be de rigueur for any ad campaign worth its salt. While channel flipping over the holidays I encountered www.adventuresofsinbad.com (winner of the "whatamouthful.com award"), www.firststrike.com (Jackie Chan fights for America in his biggest action film ever!), www.toyota.com, and www.treatsrecipes.com/home.html (rice krispie treats--"did you treat someone nice today?") that seem to cover the depth and breath of the Web's acceptance.

Although these sites battle for our consumers dollars, or at the very least a few additional hits, with their domain-name atrocities in nationwide ad campaigns, we shouldn't forget that the majority of Web sites are for the most part tildes (~) or slashes (/--subdirectories), the backbone from which the Web has grown: in many cases, home-grown labors of love for the individuals who have created them without the overwhelming abundance of resources available to development and Web design firms.

I'm not in any way trying to imply that sites that are not developed by a group of "trained" professionals are any less valuable or worthy. In many instances they are far more worthy of our attention. The beauty of being the master of your own domain, tilde, or subdirectory is that you can do what you want, freed from the tyranny of a client's capricious behavior. With the exception of one, the four sites listed below are all either tildes or slashes.

Although somewhat anti-Web in their long linear scroll design, Timothy Ingen Housz's The Elephant's Memory and Paul Haeberli's The Sum of Angels Around a Vertex are truly beautiful. They are well worth the download time necessary for all the imagery. They both play with the ideas of visual language.

Ingen Housz has creating a lexicon of individual images that are then used in a number of examples. You can determine the meaning of each grouping by evaluating the hierarchy, size, and placement as there is no dictionary with specific text equivalents. As you work through each example you learn more of the language that is the Elephant's Memory.

Haeberli's "Angels" does not have a specific lexicon of language. The spatial relationship between the angels and the framing of both positive and negative space are its strength. The user very quickly forgets that he or she is looking at those rather tacky dime-store cherubim as their specific almost arithmetic arrangement takes over in an ever-increasingly giddy Busby Berkley spectacle.

I have to admit that I'm a sucker for sites that investigate and play with HTML as a medium and not just as a means to display existing two-dimensional information. Jodi is a site that has long been on the list of many a Web designer for it's inventiveness and playful strategies. Nothing is ever what it seems, and you have to do a little digging to find all the Easter eggs.

Vivian Selbo's recently launched Watching or Looking? continues this exploration of the nature of HTML. "He who hesitates is lost" would be an ideal statement for this site. Watching or Looking? leads the user through a series of Web tableau's in which "traditional" HTML scenarios are turned upside down, ensuring that we think twice about our choices.

All four of these sites are about as far away as one can get from the commercial mainstream of mass media that now seems to have a grip on the Web's life force. Having said that I'm sure that I will immediately stumble on another gem that will cause a spark of hope and be a welcome addition to my bookmarks.

Within every Web site there are lessons to be learned, of both good and bad. >From the seemingly avant garde it's possible to trickle down ideas that will further enrich both commercial and personal sites.

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