Last night, Scoble noticed The Big Picture, a CNET News.com feature introduced with the redesign in early October. His brief post ends with
Easy to miss, too, cause it looked like an ad over on the right side of the page.
Damn!
Because The Big Picture is visual, instead of straight text, Scoble thought the visual tool was an advertisement. I know he’s not the only one.
But there are still innovative things to do with graphical presentation, or images, as an integral part of site content, not an optional part of the experience. In less than a dozen years, we’ve gone from the introduction of a web browser that supports images to a world which fears images as potential obstacles along the path to information nirvana.
I’m hardly the world’s largest advocate for visual design, probably because I can create words more easily than images. Yet that same gap in my skills helps me understand just how powerful the right image can be. I hope (and believe) that the right mix of text and graphical information is out there somewhere. I’d ask everyone publishing (blogs and beyond) to remembers that visuals support more than marketing messages. Give those poor images a chance! 😉
The larger reading public has been trained all too well that an image or a graphic is potentially (probably?) an advertisement. This tendency even has a name coined back in 1998 or so: “banner blindness.” In a mild irony, the gap contradicts the burgeoning success of photo sites. The original banner — a 468×60 rectangle born on Hotwired many years ago — is a rare bird, if not quite extinct, replaced by several other (mostly larger) sizes.
I’m not pointing fingers here. My job and my company rely on advertising to pay the bills. It works, or advertisers would not return — they are smart people who need to get a return on their investment. But it’s time to free those pixels for all uses once more.
A related curiousity: how long before the Google/Yahoo/etc. textual ad servings suffer the same “blindness”? Or will contextual appearance delay the inevitable? I know I recognize AdSense blocks instantly. I’m not yet blind to them, but I do continue seeking on the page.