Alan Lui discusses the use of visual metaphors from older media in web design and argues that such metaphors “naturalize the limitations of the new medium by disguising them within those of older media” (Reader, page 228).
Alan Lui argued in his article ‘Information Is Style’ that metaphor from new media is disguising those within the older media (2004:228), and Lui also claims the standard of really cool pages are: “those that understand the disturbance inherent in the medium so well that they do not attempt to accommodate them with a fiction of elegant harmony but instead make disturbance their medium” (2004:228). The reason that we enjoy to surf online is we do not limited by the condition of spatial and temporal which the old media has. However, there are still websites pursuing the harmony with the old media, and can’t design a really cool web pages.
Herald Sun Online (http://www.heraldsun.com.au/) is an example of such use of visual metaphor in new media, as the online version of one of the Australia famous newspaper, and it is basically mimic the daily newspaper itself. As we opening its ‘homepage’, the sections divide is basically upon its daily newspaper, for instance “Sport”, “Entertainment”, “Business”, “Travel”, “Lifestyle” and so on. These sections are settled by ‘older media’ newspaper since the limitation of space. Printed newspaper divided so many volumes just like the “shatters of glass”, the clever online version should make it looks “transparent notion of clarity” (Lui, 2004:227). In addition, readers are able to see the overview features of daily news on the website as the printed newspaper do, but we still unable to read the whole content of them in one page. Lui suggested rather than “lock content into fixed width designs”, the website like Herald Sun Online should make it as “a liquid page” which means that make the web page appears “equally attractive on narrow and wide screens”, easily expanding and contracting the unitary page, and make the content and the form looks “naturally converge” (2004:227).
The websites like Herald Sun Online should avoid “naturalized” through its daily newspaper’s structural restriction, otherwise the relationship between Herald Sun Online and it’s hard copy newspapers will like “a TV with channel controls, and a jukebox with selections that light as the cursor clicks on the buttons” (Lui, 2004: 228), it does convenience us by scrolling the mouse rather than turn pages physically, but it does not really change the intrinsic of the older media’s limitation, and it is really not COOL in this context.
Bibliography:
Alan Lui, ‘Information is Style’, in Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004, pp. 195-230
Xi Chen (Tracy) 