Ryan Stoddart's Page

I just read and responded to a most curious e-mail about my first post.

The mailer, who shall remain anonymous as he didn't choose to post his comments publicly, ignored the blog's premise and used it as a jumping point to launch an attack on designers in general, whom he called 'drooling idiots that do nothing but draw boxes all night,' and concluding that designers are the cause of the industry's downturn.

To be fair, sometimes design is overblown. Sometimes we do get carried away.

However,… Continue

Idiots. Morons. Dumb. Stupid.

No, this isn't a venom-filled rant on how stupid our readers are. Instead, I'd like to address what I believe is an unhealthy, destructive perception of our audience.

On a typical day at work, I hear at least one person say readers are dumb. We can't run a story because readers won't understand it. We must dumb down headlines because readers lack the ability to grasp higher-concepts. Says who? Oh, right, us.

I'll allow that some of our readers are in fact of less… Continue