The New Webdesign Heirarchy

Now playing: Linkin Park - Leave out All the Rest

But first, earlier in the day:
I have finally made the jump to making Firefox my default browser and I must say, wow. All these plugins and themes make everything so much better. I don’t think I’ll need to use another program, now that Firefox is my music player, my FTP client, my screenshot taker, my validator, and all sorts of other things. I even got something that allows you to render a webpage in IE so I can check cross-browser compatibility. It’s just too amazing. @.@
Oh, and I changed the theme. This one’s pretty cool. And I was going to make a more contemplative post, but I’m just too astounded by Firefox right now.

Now:
Those of you involved in the graphics community here on the internet may have noticed a disturbing new trend: famed sites of old are closing down in quick succession, citing “life” or “lack of interest” as the insurmountable obstacle. That’s perfectly understandable; I’ve experienced that ruthless prioritizing myself, though I just let nD stagnate until I regain that interest rather than closing it down. But, now, as always when the top of the food chain removes itself, now a gap is waiting to be filled, and a slew of graphics sites are springing up or stepping up their game to try to take their place. And over the past week, as I was surfing the web, I am not ashamed to say that I’ve never even heard of some of these sites before, yet their talents are surprisingly (I say ’surprisingly’ because I thought I had rooted out all the good sites in my first two years) good. I’ll give you an example: Reminiscent Designs. It looks great, right? A high-calibur site if ever I saw one. Yet prior to last week, I’d never glimpsed it before. And no wonder: it only opened half a year ago, and moved to that address 1 month ago. Change really happens quickly in this niche of the web.
But what’s that mean to us, people who’ve been around and stayed around? Now that there are all these new sites out there, it almost reminds me of the landed gentry and the noveau-riche from many countries’ histories: though I haven’t found much evidence of it out there, I myself will confess that it is tempting sometimes to snub them because they haven’t been around as long as I have, or haven’t developed that sense of netiquette needed for graphic sites. (There; now you know I secretly harbor aristocratic feelings. If I were alive during the French Revolution, I probably would have been at the top of Robespierre’s list for the guillotine.) And quite often I do an internal snicker at some of their names- I won’t mention any, because it’s mean and I do have some morals, but you know what I mean, the really over-the-top ones that seem like they just stringed together ‘mystical’ sounding words. (I’m kind of hypocritical, aren’t I, when my site name’s in freaking Latin. How much more pseudo-mystical can you get? I’m thinking about changing it soon…suggestions?) But even I admit that as comforting it is to stick to the familiar, the web designers who have been around forever (as in before I got into this) and stuck around and proved themselves to be adept designers and coders, it probably would be a good idea to venture into this new world of new names and bridge the gap between the two designing generations. Because they are, technically, the future; if this cycle plays out some more, then even more of us, the Old Brigade, will drop out and move on and then the big names will be them, the Young’uns. (I come up with such amusing names; it almost makes it sound like a fantasy novel.) And to make sure you aren’t forgotten, you need to leave a mark on the new sites. At least, that’s the business reason. I would go into friendship and all the abstract, feel-good stuff, but you can go to FaeDubh for that. Basically, if I dare speak in such archaic terms, it’s always good to add new blood to one’s kin to insure one’s memory. So at one end it’s exciting, having this chance to witness all these new talents and adding new potentials to the affiliate pool, but on the other it’s depressing to see people you yourself, when you were an inexperienced little n00b, learned from say goodbye.
And why do I even bring this up? Because thus far, I haven’t found much evidence of the two circles mixing. Looking at the affiliates of aforementioned Reminiscent Designs, I didn’t recognize a single one. And maybe I should. I mean, I visited them all, and I still think Reminiscent is the best out of the bunch, but the others aren’t half-bad. But I’d be hard-pressed to connect any of them to any of my affiliates. That indicates a divide in the community. And maybe it would be better if there wasn’t one. That’s all I’m saying.