I was going to write something about this year’s May 1st Reboot, but then felt I might sound like a hypocrite – having been a participant twice – to criticise the event. But the more I think about it, the more I feel I want to say something. So I will.
Ever since the first Reboot in 2000, and the first (massively successful) public Reboot which followed in 2001 the remit has been to present a mass relaunch of websites, free of any restriction. I.e. let your creativity flow. It was the perfect platform to show your experiments to the online world. But I feel it no longer is. The key element what made it so interesting was individuality. Every single designer who participated had, it seemed, something to say – and that was reflected in the sites. That 1st of May was something to look forward to, and spend a couple of hours clicking away through the endless list of sites.
So like every year when the Reboot was “initiated” as they like to call it, I started thrawling through the links.
Much to my disappointment I was confronted with reskinned blogs, business sites, and… portfolios that all use the same “Universal Everything” grid. You know the one.
Now most of those portfolio sites contain good work, not always to my taste, but still solid work. The point is that its a portfolio site. The main purpose of a portfolio site would be, to me at least, to showcase your work. So what we’re getting on the Reboot is a ton of sites with basically *old* content dressed up for the new season… Hardly “pushing creativity” or expressing yourself I feel. A very well designed, innovative portfolio site can be a piece of art; but if everyone is following the latest trends and using the same colours, fonts and layouts it becomes a very boring, bland affair – no matter how good the work is that is actually presented.
And another thing: reskinning your blog isn’t a reboot really is it? A reboot consitutes of starting completely from scratch. And if you want to participate, make sure you launch in time so I don’t have to click through 3 pages of holding screens or a quickly upped holding page saying “Coming soon!”. The Reboot gets announced well in advance – so you have more than enough time to do something. In fact, by now everyone knows what happens on the 1st of May in Interweb Land – so if you are that slow, you can start now for the 2010 edition (I might actually do that). Otherwise, don’t bother with doing it. If you’re going to see a football game, you want all the players to turn up in time, not half the team.
Has the Reboot lost it? Does it still have a function today when there’s enough outlets to show off your work available? I think it still has a value – it still is a great platform to showcase your work. I’m pretty sure it helped me gain some attention when I participated in 2001.
But maybe next year the rules should include “no portfolios, no trends, and no companies”. It’d be interesting.
June 12th, 2007
[...] an die Gewinner! Eine kritische Auseinandersetzung mit dem Reboot gibt es bei Tom Muller zu lesen. Hm, Ich muss Ihm da Recht geben…. [...]
June 17th, 2007
Yea, back in the day there was always a test of new technologies, pushing the envelope, totally insane sometimes. Now everyone has their own blog and runs their portfolio through that or some other CMS, it’s the boring side to Web 2.0 where functionality is more important than style. I also believe that’s the way to go, because in the past everything was screwed up all over the page and just to update a link, you’d have to open up photoshop, flash and dreamweaver just to make it work. What I’d really like to see is people playing more with the CMS / blog tech and customising the way they function. To hell with the themes, let’s hack the code, make errors and invent new styles from that.
BTW: Where’s Kurt Cloninger?
June 17th, 2007
Exactly. I’m all for new technology, CMS-driven sites etc, but I miss the experimentation sometimes, certainly with an event such as the Reboot where I’d love to see people tearing it up.
June 18th, 2007
from what i remember, last years winner was someone who didnt even reboot. it was an existing site.
but yeah… like three years ago, it was something to be excited about. but nowadays, nobody actually reboots, most people dont make the deadline, its really nothing exciting. i pretty much hate the idea now. haha
June 28th, 2007
Well, I agree in some parts & in seme I don’t.
I cant really compare this year’s reboot to 2000-2001 ones, because I wasnt much into web stuff then & I first time saw M1R in 2003.
As in 2006, I participated in this years edition, without success & now I can say, the idea didn’t work too well for me. It should give us some more freedom. The deadline made that I rushed my site again and it didnt turn out as I expected & it also pretty limited my creativity, because I was just focused more on the “corretness”, just to be up to some “standards” & not much on creativity. Also the voting part wasn’t a good Idea while every kid with variable IP or soemthing could vote as many times as the wanted.
On the other hand, I cant agree that the sites weren’t actually rebooted. Maybe the word “reboot” doesnt really fit here, but Almost everyone put his effort on “redesigning” his site ( some didnt do that and still was there & some just had their site designed by others, which I don’t classify as a reboot. after all, everyone could go to some web rockstars to design a kickass site for them, so in this part the idea of M1R lacks) so for me it’s kinda like reboot, however keeping your site down for a week or so, just by a predefined date looks pretty artificial.
Anyway, I think some rules there need to be changed & I hope they’ll do that.
Good points on this topic Tom.
Greets