[Sigia-l] drop down menus

[Ziya Oz]

> Standards, by definition limit creativity.

Or unleash it.

Immediate evidence: the Internet.

If every time one started to email, one had to reinvent a new protocol  for
email headers, one could argue that the contents of that email (where
presumably real creativity resides) would inevitably suffer due to the
simple waste of time with the former activity.

Or if every time a digital designer wanted to draw something, he had to
reinvent a resolution-independent language for describing the appearance and
layout of documents his creativity may suffer a tad. PostScript and tools
built on that standard allowed a vast reservoir of traditional designers to
move to page layout, typography, video, etc., on digital devices.

People are more creative when they don't have to deal with the plumbing of
their medium every time a potentially creative process is about to take
place, so they can spend more time and energy on the latter.

But perhaps the best example of this is the recent move by Macromedia to
'standardize' the look and feel of UI widgets (check boxes, drop down menus,
etc) in Flash MX. 

In the past few years, we had an explosion in the variety of  these widgets,
even though the counterparts of these widgets were well established in
Win/Mac OSes that virtually all users have been using.

It seemed like every designer was reinventing them to be different than the
next designer, making the ensuing Flash pieces look as if the designer spent
more time on these widgets than the actual content. They added very little
to the overall value of the piece and, more often than not, distracted
attention from the main event.

Macromedia listened and 'standardized' the basic UI components, so now we
have a base level to work from. If you're an enterprising designer in need
of cheap thrills these components are 'skinnable' so you can create your own
'standard' and some inevitably will, but I surmise that the vast majority of
Flash designers will end up using the basic components and not waste their
time on re-inventing base-level UI widgets. This way they will have far more
time to dedicate to the design of actual content and structure.

Just imagine for a moment that standards did not exist for, say, HTML. And
then ponder on "Standards, by definition limit creativity."

Best,

Ziya