Just Five · 8 February 2002
It seems I’ll be a judge in this year’s 5k competition, alongside such grownups as Susan Kare (whose influence on the design of that which lays between you and the information on your computer is dazzlingly, witheringly vast), Clement Mok and Bruce Sterling (who apparently writes...?).
If you’re unfamiliar with the 5k, you should familiarize yourself. My friend Vaitkunas says that good design, such as that of a perfect logo, feels like haiku: made of reductions. Setting out to write and design an entire website constrained to a handful of kilobytes of code, in the face of all this bounty – all this plentiful bandwidth and plugins and trickery – is such a jarring challenge: you can’t help but reassess why choices get made. It should be a mandatory exercise for design students everywhere.
Stewart, you now owe me a dinner.
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