Bring on the word counters

Architectural Review, The, Sept, 2004 by Sutherland Lyall

The US architecture/environment practice, Plasmatic Concepts, asked us to take a look at its new site at www.plasmatic-concepts.com. The home page is white with an elegant patch of blood in a bath of water, or a thick red waft of smoke trailing into the distance or, well you click vaguely in the vicinity of the 'enter' text and there is the definition: 'Plas-mat-ic: forming shaping, molding'.

So now we all know. 'Con-cept' is also defined but I guess you all know what that means already. Don't get me wrong, this is actually a nice site. But I was especially struck by the fact there are two arrows at the side of this text which you use to scroll text up and down. This is because there is more text than the page can cope with, I spend a lot of time berating print designers who regularly have serious problems making the jump across to screen design. But there is one thing from print I wish they could keep in mind. It is that journalists know how to write to length. Ask for 333 words and that's what you get. OK, maybe the intervention of a skilled sub-editor is involved. If you ever stopped to think how it is that newspaper and magazine articles manage, time after time, to magically finish right at the end of the page, here is your answer: writing to length. So there is no excuse for irritating scrolling of text up and down, especially when it's for quite small distances. In the text I'm looking at now on the Plasmatic Welcome page, I can see a whole paragraph whose absence would completely obviate the need for scrolling and improve the Plasmatic offer no end. No, I'm not offering my services.