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Fire Your Designers; We Have Templates!

Written on
July 9th 2007
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by Dan Fradin  |
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dodgeball2.jpgI remember years ago when I decided that my passion was for the internet, rather than my useless $20,000 Legal Studies BA that I would kick start my learning by buying several CDs containing an array of button templates. Armed with these CDs, I set about creating some “cutting-edge” navigation.

Rousing my new found excitement, I ate up the “power” of FrontPage templates, navigation templates, logo templates, template templates, interweb templates, webbernet templates and every other template I could get my templated hands on.

Well, long story short, relying on templates stymied my designs and soon enough anything I created for the web resembled everyone else’s templated (I know, I know, it’s not a word) site. I found—humbling as it was—that I sucked as a designer.

So what broke me out of my creative lull? One word: PhotoShop. I fell head over heels for PS 4.0 and haven’t looked back since. Good-bye, templates. Hello, creative freedom!

Fast forward almost 10 years and we seem to be at another template cross roads. This time, in rich media advertising.

Maybe some designers want templates to create rich media, but I don’t buy that the majority of designers want templates for anything other than text links. And for text links, you need a copywriter not a designer. Rich media by definition is rich. Meaning that it’s robust, intricate, compelling, interactive and engaging. Try to get that out of a text link.

There is a trend now with some vendors attempting to templatize (again, I know, I know!) the art of rich media advertising, whether it’s a visual or code-based system designed to make the creation of rich media ads “easier” and “simpler”.

Similar to when I first learned how to use PhotoShop and Flash, it was difficult to learn, but with practice, time and education I was able to generate some well-received, non-templatized web content.

Sure, with the right API or slick GUI upload interface, rich media does become simpler to implement but it shouldn’t negatively affect file sizes where every last K counts. Nor should it force developers to write unnecessary, redundant code to do something that an API wasn’t really designed to do.

Rich media vendors need to be the means to the end to help push the envelope in Flash or Silverlight and not dictate what size, color and shape of the envelope to use.



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Reader Comments.

I agree 100% Dan. There are definitely some solutions (new and old) in place that truly weaken all that is great about rich media. Keeping file sizes down and eliminating any extraneous workload by offering the most efficient and extensive production tool available allows creative agencies to not just push the envelope, but shove it forward blazing trails for the entire industry.

Ryan

Posted by Ryan Manchee | 4:02 pm on July 9, 2007.

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