Jeremy Keith – Enhance!

Much in line with the talk about advancing the web without breaking it in his talk at beyond tellerrand this year Jeremy Keith argues for the benefits of starting with simple solutions to the problem at hand and building upon a solid foundation instead of giving in to the temptation starting out with ever more complex layers upon layers of complex tools and frameworks.

Jeremy advocates progressive enhancement, that is making content accessible to every platform and browser while still using the capabilities of modern, high-performance environments when available.

He starts with the premise of rewiring your mind and embracing paradigm shifts. There’s the famous example of the negative space arrow in the FedEx logo that once you’ve seen it for the first time, you can’t ‘unsee’ any more. It’ll always be blatantly obvious to you. Jeremy gives another, hilarious example of this involving ducks. After you’ve seen this video, ducks will never look the same to you any more …

The web constitutes such a paradigm shift: A fundamentally different, decentralized and accessible medium. Embracing the capabilities of the web and designing for those instead of just pursuing cargo cult and applying print design to the new medium, is what’s vital to truly explore opportunities the web has to offer.

Jeremy Keith – Enhance! – beyond tellerrand DÜSSELDORF 2015 from beyond tellerrand on Vimeo.