The ELW Manifesto is what all manifestos should be: a public declaration of principles and intentions.  As web designers in the truest sense, we think this is important!

  • Web design should not be the realm of graphic designers. Graphic design is important, but it should never be the focus when creating a successful website.  If graphic design was paramount, our browsers bookmarks would be pointed to beautiful, well drawn, web pictures.  Instead our bookmarks and homepages are usually pointed to ugly mashups of text and ads.  Google may have a clean simple homepage, but they make all of their money from the annoying clutter of ads that appear on the side.
  • Search engine optimization should not be the realm of marketers. Search engines are the primary method used by regular people to find things they want to see, watch, read, and buy.  The overwhelming amount of work required to organize and operate a search engine is done by computers.  Marketers have sold their methods to businesses for hundreds of years.  Every time something has been written with the intention of persuading someone to act, there has been a range of good and bad ways to write it.  In the past, the most effective writers were the ones who were the most in tune with how humans make decisions.  Humans no longer make the decision about what you see when you type a search phrase into a search engine.  Computers now decide what we will see, with only a little help from humans.  The masters of the new mind are now computer scientists.
  • Being free changes everything. In the past a newspaper had to be selective and only print the best information available.  It would have been prohibitively costly to print all of the news and opinions.  Paper, printing, and even physically delivering the paper was an enormous drain on resources.  We now live in that once imaginary world where every piece of news, information, and opinion can be shared easily.  Compared to the old world, information is basically free.  A single hard drive can easily store every word of text you will ever type in your life.  It won’t be long before a single storage unit will be able to store every sound you hear for your entire life, in stereo.
  • Storage and transmission are unimportant. What is important is sorting and organizing a large mass of data.  Search engines are failing at this job.  The battle for your attention is being fought on a grand scale, and you have lost.  Instead of defeating spam by training our minds and focusing on quality, an algorithm was developed to treat us like randomly wandering zombies.  Until we find a better way to organize our information on the way out, the search engines will make us slaves to their methods of bringing information back in.
  • Computers are a tool for the human mind. If you want to keep it that way, there is only one weapon.  Your ability as a human being to produce new information and goods that other humans want to consume is the only advantage you have left.  Our science fiction warns us of a world where computers become artificially intelligent overlords.  Is it any different if there is a few humans at the top running the computers?  It is probably more dangerous since a human with all the power will make very human mistakes.  We already live in this science fiction world.  The people in charge already think of you as cattle that should be slaughtered when you eat more than you are worth.  Great atrocities have been managed, efficiently, using far less technology.