This pretty well sums up my feelings on the "America by design" stunt...
"In other words, we’re left with a web page announcing a new era of design for the United States government, but it’s tremendously costly to download, and inaccessible to many. What I want to suggest is that neither of these things are accidents: they read to me as signals of intent; of how this administration intends to practice design."
Well done, Ethan Marcotte.
Oh, and this banger of a paragraph 🤘
"Throughout the text, there’s a single-minded emphasis on aesthetics over design. We’ve already seen that in the studio’s disregard for the page’s weight and accessibility — and now we’re seeing it carried through the page’s text. Design for this “national studio” is about surface-level signals of “experience” and “beauty,” instead of the messy, iterative, imperfect work involved in designing something for people."
1/2
"When this “national studio,” and the administration that created it, tells us it wants to create “an experience that projects a level of excellence for our nation”? That’s aesthetics with a nationalistic twist, and we should take them at their word."
2/2
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