Ms. Pistachio was the first to alert me, via Twitter, natch, that Skittles had gone all Social Media on us. Sure as shootin', the current (March 2, 2009) Skittles.com is a mash-up of social media sites where the name of the colorful and intoxicatingly concentrated jelly-bean-oidal confection appears.
Of course, Skittles, with the aid of Agency.com, are following in the footsteps of Modernista!, who took their own website in this direction last year. Still, the fact that a consumer brand has emulated a trendy design shop has got everybody talking, including the ever articulate (and strikingly handsome) David Armano, who rightly predicts, I believe, that we'll see more of this, not less and goes on to link the Skittle move to the emergence of "sponsored conversations."
But what is this "this" that we're going to be seeing more of? I think it's something we could call "aleatoric" design which takes advantage of the fact that web pages, in the end, exist as a set of instructions to be executed by a browser, not a fixed arrangement of text and image (as in the print world). Since these instructions can be linked to dynamic sites themselves (Twitter, YouTube, Wikipedia, etc.), "design now becomes the quasi-symphonic arrangement of fluid elements that resist control or even predictability.
Given this tendency, wouldn't it be better for web designers to have a background in performance, choreography, or musical composition than graphic arts? Isn't it time we acknowledged that interactive design is NOT graphic design (or that the latter is an increasingly small and incidental component of the former)?
I like this idea... but will it work? Do we want to listen to music for 8 radios by john cage, or something more focused? On the other hand... it seems like using an existing infrastructure... for all of us to work off of, connect with, share, be creative with, will lift all boats or will it?
I can have a website as fancy as skittles in a half an hour.. maybe I will... I'll call it dittles... I just need to be as famous as skittles first.
"I just need to be as famous as Skittles first." - There's the rub! This approach to web design/orchestration depends on the fact that there is indeed something to orchestrate.