Distant relatives.

Occasionally, one of the masses that read the missives on this page leave comments in unrelated articles about something they see in the list of links I provide. The links that appear there are little bits and pieces that I pick up from trolling the feedreaders for things that interest me.

I rationalize that I’m looking primarily for business, productivity and design articles, but invariably I trip over things that either provoke or augment conversations that I have offline among my flesh-and-blood confreres.

And so it goes that today I’m going to feature a couple of links that I’ve recently seen. I found them both this morning, and for some reason they seem related, although distantly.

One is Jeffery Zeldman’s amazing essay Understanding Web Design—in part about how web design is for the most part misunderstood. He provides a thesis that it bears as much or more in common with architecture and typography than graphic design and illustration. And Kevin Cornell’s illustration at the top say it better than my words ever could.

And the other is New York photographer Joseph O. Holmes inspired images of silhouettes of people viewing displays at the Museum of Natural History. The body language tells us so much about how they understand what they are seeing. The images themselves are references to the act of using the architecture of the Museum to view it’s content. They are defining it, and through the photographer’s work, in turn becoming a part of it. It’s what Zeldman posits that web sites are and can be and should be. And it is absolutely beautiful.

The thread is tenuous but the connective, somehow, is there, at least for me. That thread is why I am attracted to web design. That thread contains the work I want to do.

Apologies to all those looking for more uncredited photos of bears crapping in the woods. I’ll post more like that in the very near future. Promise.