Dreaming spheres

Architectural Review, The, Oct, 2004 by Sutherland Lyall

So we're not so dumb that we don't know that a lot of the above silly twiddles are camouflage, diversions of attention for image files being secretly loaded. A colleague reckons that websites should have a mandatory 'skip introduction' button on the home page. It might persuade lazy web designers to find out how to load images fast.

It can be done, and is done quite often. The interesting site of young US practice Kolatan MacDonald Studio at www.kolatanmacdonaldstudio.com starts off with the website name which grows and when it looks set, and only then, you can click on it. Its characters break up and turn into drifting slightly smudgy coloured dots. More upload camouflage, you think. You click on the red one and out scrambles the word 'portfolio'--which you notice is repeated in a row across the bottom before the word zooms out at you and the screen is changed to some monochrome spherical blobs of different sizes doing a dreamy Brownian movement around the screen. Click on a smaller blob--but look, you go off and do it, and remember that if you click on the small grey circle you get a description and another scheme comes up if you click on one of the smaller blobs at the bottom and ...