I picked this name way back in the early days of web development — back in the days of blink-tags and animated gifs. Back when the marquee-tag seemed like a good idea and all the pages had gray backgrounds.
William Durandus was a 13th century canonist responsible for documenting the practices of the Catholic Church but his name came to my attention when I began studying early typography to inform my own web design efforts. Everybody knows that Gutenberg is credited with the development of moveable type — a “fact” sometimes disputed for a variety of reasons. It’s probably safe to say that he made it popular by printing Bibles. What is not as well known is that one of the classic examples of excellence in print comes from a pair of Austrian printers – Schoeffer and Fust – who printed the first edition of Durandus’s Rationale divinorum officiorum in 1459. Schoeffer and Fust became known for good weight, excellent proportion, and superb layouts — attributes that were not generally applied to web pages in the early days of the medium.
When looking for a name, I picked this one because I wanted my web design work to be as well thought out as the original Schoeffer and Fust printing and focused on delivering the message without a lot of the tricks and gimmickry so prevalent at the time.
In many ways, that ideal hasn’t changed.
Welcome to my world.
If you enjoyed this article, please consider sharing it!
