Marianne Plano at Summer School as School 2022
August 18, 2022, 20:00
Venue: Boxing Club

The Designer, the Developer, and the Control: Computer Graphics and When to let it go
Discussant: Albert Heta

“What’s the point of all that design if the website cannot load?”
“What’s the point of you programming if you cannot make it work?”
“How about we trash your 30Mo 3Ds images? It’ll load like a charm.”
“How about we trash the devices that can’t load them quick enough?”

Developer me and designer me, late night talking.

A tale of two beauties

The designer and the web developer are both craftsmen of accessibility. They serve the same master: content. Writers, bloggers, users, you should be grateful for having such a staff supporting, spreading, and designing your words and images, all of us staying up late for the world to (best) read about what’s going on your mind. Or in your business. Whether that’s worth it or not, shall not be discussed in the present text.
That said, if designers and developers serve the same master, they don’t follow the same rules, they don’t obey the same codes and they don’t prioritize the same things. We shall say, they don’t seek the same beauty1. Which often turns them into opponents, each of them being ignorant of the other’s beautiful and, only building websites that fulfill his specific goals. Resources optimization, low maintenance, accessibility for all devices would the developer say. Grids, typographic detail and consistency in rendering would the designer say. As expected, that difference in perspective leads to bloody fights, on which only! good web design is able to take roots and grow.

Biographies:
Marianne Plano is a French graphic designer and developer based in Brussels. Trained with the Luuse collective, her work questions digital tools, through an instinctive and dedicated practice of programming.

Albert Heta is a doctoral researcher, artist, designer, and art manager. His work, including “It’s time to go visiting: No visa required” (2003), a public intervention on British Airways billboards in Pristina, "Embassy of the Republic of Kosova, Cetinje, Serbia and Montenegro (2004), and the “Kosovar Pavilion Venice Biennial 2005” distributed through e-flux, never fail to provoke debate in relation to the social, cultural, and political mechanisms of power.
He is the founding director of Stacion – Center for Contemporary Art Pristina and Summer School as School.