Graphic Web Design Should Violate the Queen

Contributed by Ian Hess

Graphic Power in Web Design is about Violating the Queen

You're already using the Queen's English, but, we don't call graphics used in Web design the "Queen's Graphics," do we! Graphic images provide us a visual language and a vocabulary far exceeding the limits of text. Or would that be, "The Queen's Text? "

Of course, there are many who make the mistake of calling it the King's English, but the last King's been dead now for quite some years, and until Prince Charles or one of Princess Di's boys take the throne, it won't be the King's English again until then.

We Do Not Appreciate the Freedom of Graphics in Web Design

Graphics in Web design can show us truths in ways any author could not get away with in text because the history of text requires it be more properly used than graphics. In one part, this is because Kings and Queens once regulated the use of language; in another part, this is because our intensely visual culture has only recently been flooded by the conventions of popular media, which are more informed by the requirements of art than by royal laws suppressing freedoms.

For example, graphics can be seductive without being lewd; whereas, if we were to depict the same content in text, it would jump right out at us as we were forced to describe what we saw. As one judge stated about pornography, "I cannot define it, but I know it when I see it."

Authors have achieved a higher status in our society by being personages in partial control of a respected medium of power. Media's popularization occurred alongside the advent of photography, making publishing a more multimedia medium, thus mixing the morals of the visual with the textual.

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