Linknote — — 112 words

Technology — Web

Underscores, optimisation and arms races

The story of how one character — the underscore (_) — provided an early glimpse of the problems we now face with dominant tech firms exerting their power over the web.

We found ourselves resistant to what felt like a coercive effect of Google’s rising domination, especially since Google’s own Blogger platform was a competitor of ours. Our expression of that frustration was expressed by a debate over a single character: We were using _ because we thought it looked nicer, so why should we change to – just because Google liked it better? Weren’t they supposed to adapt to what we published on the web?

Article — — 1,021 words

Information architecture — User experience — Web

Work:

Adapted from a post originally published on the University of St Andrews Digital Communications team blog. The first project of the digital communications team is a relaunch of the website for prospective students. This project began about a year ago, long before the digital communications team was formed. Lean sessions In early 2013, members of […]