I remember sitting comfortably on my Grandmother’s sofa atop grey carpeting in a prefabricated house, air-conditioned in the heat of the summer break, with my mind deep into a book that Hillman Curtis wrote, “Flash Web Design”. It wasn’t the technology that was interesting, despite the book being primarily technical, it was in the examples and the essays that made life grow from the cracks in the concrete. It lit my mind into the potential in an interactive medium, ecstatic with the idea that interfaces and navigation tell stories, and are not the cold, rigid, and heirarchical structures of the default of files, folders, menus, dropdowns, and tabs.

The spirit of exploration has been lost that existed back in 1998. Especially with the rise of social media networks. The web has become dominated by buttons to click, forms to fill, and has become rigid, dissociated and obsessed with statistics.  Sunk into a depression of coldness and homogeny, we must give it life again. It’s saddening to think that those whom are teenagers today, as I was, experience a much different web. Who is the inspiration for the next generation of web designers in this vast land of forms and fields, cut off from being able to see how it’s all put together?

Let us all carry with us everyday, the legacy of the innovator, Hillman Curtis. And remind ourselves of how to bring life to the lifeless, and make visible the invisible.

-Braydon