Ephemera, Chapter One: The Tension of the Template
Each chapter of Living Digital Media includes behind-the-materials that I made or saved while composing this project and the chapter. Journal entries, audio outtakes, snippets of code, conversations—I call these ephemera because they’re materials that are often discarded or abandoned when I move closer to a final publication. Living Digital Media’s “Ephemera” sections, however, work against my tendencies to discard project materials over time. Waste not. Some materials were made in anticipation of this section, while others simply surfaced when I was composing. Nevertheless, I hope it’s useful for anyone who does or is interested in this doing digital work.
"Ephemera: Chapter One” has two focal points: the design of the book, and some of the media decisions in this chapter.
A Burning Question: Should I Use a Web Design Template or Design This from the Ground Up?
When I was first working out the design of this book, I was at an impasse: design it from the ground up with code, or work from a template? There are so many drag-and-drop web design templates out there, such as Webflow, Squarespace, Google Sites, and WordPress. For many of us out there, these third-party services provide just what we need—a means to quickly get your professional website up and running without having to hire a coder or designer. However, as suggested by interview participant Brooke in Chapter One, they have limitations, such as disabling options to move image boxes and changing cascading style sheets. In addition, drag-and-drop platforms are generally difficult to export to servers other than ones from which they originated. For example, the journal Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy no longer allows contributors to send submissions in the form of WordPress sites. (As a Kairos editor, I can say from experience that WordPress sites produce a TON of junk code.) These sites from third-party services are not intended to be moved to another platform but rather contained to said service because the features are so baked into the service’s server and infrastructure.
Ultimately, I chose a middle ground: hand-coding and drastically changing an HTML5 template. More on that in a moment.
Relatedly, My family Built Their Own Printing Press from the Ground-up
While designing this book, I was constantly reminded that my grandfather, with the help of my dad and uncle, built a printing press from the ground up. Here’s a photo and the associated caption from an article in 1980, which describes how the printer came to be.
Figure 5
My Grandfather's Printing Press
You read that right: four tons of cast iron. This feat is a good reminder that a DIY approach to design perhaps allows for more creative control. It also reminds me that collaboration is critical for innovation. In my case, conversations with colleagues in the early stages of this book gave shape to the design.
A Conversation with Dr. Stevie Bell
While I was still mulling over design, I called up some colleagues and recorded our conversations with their permission. Here is a conversation with Dr. Stevie Bell about working with templates vs. hand-coding my digital book. Bell is a colleague in the Writing Department at York University and researches digital media pedagogy across the curriculum. She also teaches and makes frequent use of Google Sites for syllabi and conference presentations. Her approach to templates sheds new light on Kristin L. Arola’s (2010) seminal argument in “The Design of Web 2.0: The Rise of the Template, The Fall of Design,” as well as John R. Gallagher’s (2015) vision of “The Rhetorical Template.” More recent of the two, Gallagher’s article defines templates as
prefabricated designs that allow writers to create a coherent text. They differ from text-editors—e.g., word processing programs—in that they are forms with predetermined design and layout. These templates can be viewed in two ways. First, they can act as the rhetorical situation in which writers participate; various elements in the rhetorical situation combine to form a template. In the second case, a template is one of many elements in a rhetorical situation (p. 2).
Here is Bell speaking with me about templates.
Rich Shivener: Where do you land on having students design their own stuff versus using templates? Like, what do you what do you think about templates? Because that's the biggest thing I’m facing now is, I could use HTML5 templates, I could use Webflow, or I could do something else. But I don't know if that's going to be seen as weak or unoriginal or something like that.
Stevie Bell: So I mean, I think that there’s a ... you're talking about two different skills. I think using templates is a skill itself. When I'm teaching my first- and second-year students, we always start with a template, and we observe what it's trying to do. We talk about the genre it's constructing, and we critically evaluate its use of layout and typography. And we think about why we think it will work for what we're trying to do, and maybe what specific elements aren’t quite working. We adjust the template from there. So there's a bit of working from a template, to learn what it's doing and why it's good, but also how we can improve it for our own purposes. But you're teaching a lot of the time, third- and fourth-year students in a digital writing class. And so what I see myself doing is building those foundations and giving them lots of examples by having them look at a lot of templates. Yeah, what I imagine you're doing is saying, “okay, so up into this point, you've been relying on like, Canva templates, and you know, Google site templates, and web templates. We're going to make a template, and, you know, maybe for each other ...and see how they work, or how they compare to the professional ones, things like that.” And those are my thoughts.
Shivener: Yeah, that's great. So students get to do that stuff, right? Like mine, they're doing some hand coding. And I think the thing that I’m worried about what with this book is, if I use a template, even if it's like HTML5, I wonder what the field's gonna think. So even if I were to take Webflow, and do it all in there, then export the code and manipulate it later. I don’t know. I'm worried that it’s gonna be like, “you haven't done the rigor.” You know what I mean? Like, is that something ... I don't know, if that's something that seems like a valid concern or not?
Bell: I don't know. I may not be the best person to ask about that concern, because I'm an extraordinarily pragmatic person all around. And so I think when you’re talking about teaching, like pedagogy of design, things like what you want your students to walk away with, and I think what they need to be able to do ... the probably the most valuable school skill you can give someone right now, is the ability to adjust an existing template for their own purposes—and to see, you know, how to do that, and evaluate templates that are there for what they're trying to do, how to adjust it, how to implement it in a consistent banner across their design, or whatever they're trying to do. Because we're not really working on a build-it-yourself internet anymore. And when the majority of our students are probably going to end up being in the gig economy, doing contract work, are they going to be spending the time to build something from the ground up? Or are they going to be doing exactly what you’re describing, which is being incredibly resourceful, and is highly skilled work, right? So really, I think that's fine. And I think what you're describing is maybe a little bit of ego. I'm not saying that you have an ego, but the field's bias towards like, “Oh, well, that’s not rigorous if you're not building it yourself,” well, I didn’t build my car myself, but I chose the car I need. I learned how to drive. I adapted my driving. All of that is highly skilled. I think those are the skills that our students will actually end up using, whereas the coding is going to be something that they can put on their resume to get a job. They might not be the skills they use in the job.
A Conversation with Professional Web Designer and User-Experience (UX) Facilitator, Adrienne Baker, who also spoke about templates
I also had a conversation with professional web designer and user-experience (UX) facilitator Adrienne Baker, who also spoke about the purpose of templates. During our conversation, Baker discussed the purpose of templates for occupations. A small-business owner isn’t worried about hand-coding a site because that practice is less important than preparing the site’s visual appeal and ease of navigation for visitors. By contrast, creators and editors take more stock in hand-coding because it yields more unique designs. This contrast constantly reminded me to ask myself: Who have I designed this book for?
Rich Shivener: So what do you think about, in terms of web design, what do you think about templates?
Adrienne Baker: I think templates are good for specific purposes. If you have someone like a small business owner that needs their business to have more visibility, a template is a perfect way to take your content and put it in to a template and get your website out to the world. The problem with templates is when your content doesn't fit perfectly into the template, or you need to do something custom. And also, if your business is trying to do something, maybe a little bit out of the ordinary, so you need to target like specific people or specific group of people. That's where someone like, you know, an SEO [search engine optimization] expert or a web design expert can come in, and you're probably going to have to break out of a template at that point, because you're going to need to do some different things to try to target or help users of a specific group.
Shivener: Oh, that's interesting. I just, you know, I see this back and forth ... web designers talk about templates, and then others are like, “no, don't use them,” you know, and stuff. And yeah, it's interesting. I'm kind of in that middle space. So we'll see what happens.
Adrienne Baker: It can be very limiting. If you're trying to do something .... I guess, just to put it in simple terms, if what you're trying to do is very basic, a template is going to be perfect for you. But if you have ... if you're trying to accomplish something that is not basic, for example, targeting [users] or something like that, the templates .... you're just going to hit a wall.
HTML5 is Alive in the Field
This digital book is based on an HTML5 web design template called “Massively.” “Massively” was created by a web designer known simply as AJ, who runs the site HTML5UP.net. The website has dozens of templates that are available under a Creative Commons license, meaning users can download and edit the templates as long as attribution is given.
But there’s something interesting happening in writing studies.
HTML5Up templates are becoming a go-to resource for scholarly webtext creators. At the time of completing this publication, Computers and Composition Online had three publications based on those templates, Kairos had three, and Computers and Composition Digital Press had one book. My sense is that templates like AJ’s are now preferred over WordPress and drag-and-drop platforms because they are flexible enough for content creators—that is, the coding has been started for you; you just have to know enough coding to change paragraphs, headers, etc..
The problem is that the number of templates offered by AJ are limited, meaning there is a risk of webtexts looking the same in terms of design. This risk runs counter to the missions of scholarly webtext publishing venues, which encourage and celebrate innovative work that departs from traditional scholarship. Enter the tension in publishing. Publishers and editors want to be inclusive and accessible, but they also don’t want templates to become standardized. I have similar goals, one being that I hope readers feel welcome to replicate my design and approaches. But I also want to be unique, creating an original contribution in words as well as design.
The Solution: Tear Down and Build a Template (and Be Nice about It)
I’m not exactly interested in flexing my coding muscles, something already done by many dudes (Easter, 2020). For me, “Massively” was just a starting point, a shell, a set of boundaries in which to innovate. As depicted in the examples below, I eliminated the responsive navigation bar, added “Navigation Options” in the navigation menu on the right, and added my own multimedia configurations. Although I have changed the template somewhat significantly, it’s still rather easy to navigate, just as the template was intended to do. To me, the biggest challenge was to make the template my own. Channeling Gallagher’s argument, I acknowledge that “templates”—includes those on HTML5UP.net—“may erase many choices of design, [but] I have argued that possible design choices still remain through creative subversion and innovation” (p. 9). Gallagher suggests that the subversion of a template parlays into an original design, or at least one that looks and feels more unique to the designer. Because they are delivered with a Creative Commons license, the HTMLUP templates are quite open to subversion and innovation.
Media Notes: Thinking about Quotations in Sound
Besides subverting and innovating with the design of the book, I decided to experiment with audio and video for the chapters of Living Digital Media. Every chapter begins with brief videos that set the tone for the chapter. In the early stages of developing this project, I tried to narrate the entire text of every chapter, and I asked colleagues such as Sarah Tarkhoff, Beth Caravella, Laura Allen, and Brian Hotson to read some quotations. At times, when I was citing a written passage from a book or a project artifact, a block quote or segment felt . . . flat . . . if read by me. My solution was to call on some colleagues to record a voiceover of the quotes. When I asked them for help, I offered little direction about the voiceovers so as not to skew toward particular affects on the passages; my goal was to add another to the listening experience, reflecting the internal reading we do when we read a review.
Ultimately, I scraped the idea of narrating the entire chapters due to length and time constraints, two factors that reviewers said might affect audiences engaging with the book. In any case, here are the voiceovers submitted to me. At the time, I asked my colleagues to narrate passages from reviewer letters that authors shared with me.
Brian’s reading of an excerpt in a reviewer letterEarlier reviewers at the Tier 1 level did indicate that they found your webtext fairly text-heavy. For example, one reviewer suggested . . . A reviewer also suggested . . . At the Tier 2 (Editorial Board) level, readers seemed to focus more on the content than the design, but did have some suggestions for tweaks to the design to make the webtext more user-friendly throughout.Sarah’s of an excerpt in a reviewer letter
“The ‘sloppy, inexpert design’ really drove me crazy. . . . I was constantly ending up in places I did not know how to get out of and the only solution I could find was to close the [web browser] window and start over.”Beth’s reading of an excerpt in a reviewer letter
Regarding your photos, you will need to provide ALT text, captions, and APA-style citations on your references list for these images. . . . It would also be nice if one could access a higher resolution image by clicking on the thumbnails.Laura’s reading of an excerpt in a reviewer letter
You might consider enabling users to adjust the size of the graphs to adapt to their display. (Mobile display looks great in both iOS and Android.)
Highlight Video: Composing Chapter One and the Book’s Design
This 12-minute video reveals the writing, coding, and revising I did in the early stages of developing the book before it went to reviewers. It depicts my work in Scrivener, in Brackets, and with Creative Commons media during the first year of development. A version of this video was published for the edited collection Revising Moves, edited by Allison D. Carr, Christina M. LaVecchia, Laura R. Micciche, Hannah J. Rule, and Jayne E.O. Stone.
Sound: The jazzy song "Brad PKL" by Blue Dot Sessions begins.
Video: The video opens with the title card that reads “Editing a template,” which refers to the program the author used to edit the webpages of this book. After the title card, the video cuts to the author's computer screen, on which the author opens the web editing application Brackets. For several minutes, the screen show the work of the author editing in Brackets and displaying webpages with the title "Feeling Digital Media." The video has been speed up to 300 percent, so the work moves very quickly.
Sound: The jazzy song "Dany PKL" by Blue Dot Sessions begins.
Video: For several more minutes, the screen shows the work of the author editing in Brackets and displaying webpages with the title “Feeling Digital Media.” The video has been speed up to 300 percent, so the work moves very quickly.
Sound: The jazzy song "Friction Model" by Blue Dot Sessions begins.
Video: The screen continues showing the work of the author editing in Brackets and displaying webpages such as Unsplash, Stack Overflow, and ones with the titles “Feeling Digital Media” and “This is a Massive Headline.”