Upon reading the Mediaworks Pamphlets’ Online Supplements I have begun to develop a complaint. Mark Bernstein posted to his blog a few days ago about software aesthetics, and I think my complaint here might be of a similar vein.

The Media Pamphlets come in two forms, and invariably I found myself preferring the text only format to the confusing, flash-y, and way-too-multilinear, “special” documents. A complicated thingy with a bunch of links and a text only version of the same thing really opened my eyes to how much time really can be wasted by an interface. Rather than waste time with links to things I can’t see, I could skim the whole contents at once, using headers instead of links to point me to where I wanted to go. I simply skipped the paragraphs with headers acting like links I didn’t want to follow — and even a page mostly full of text I didn’t want loaded so much faster than a confusing but pretty page of design I didn’t want.

Surely there is some way to present text in a more dynamic way than text-only, and yet in a way where the design doesn’t get in the way.

I would love to link to particular parts of the web supplement, for example, but the link structure will not allow for that, so I can only refer to the entire thing. The lexicon word map is cute, but poorly legible. For a system like that, the perfect word map I think you should consult the visual thesaurus online version.