Star Wars and Web Development?

The anticipation is peaking, and the galaxy is waiting for the premiere of the salvation-of-the-Star-Wars-series installment from JJ Abrams: The Force Awakens. No matter your opinion of the most recent prequel trilogy (or the original triad, for that matter), you’d have to be made of stone not to get shivers watching that second teaser (wrecked Star Destroyers? yes, please).  So after all the hype (and all the merch), the day is upon us and it will be pretty obvious on Friday morning who went to the late screenings Thursday night.

Star Wars at PINT, Inc.

The PINT team is no different than the rest of the planet (maybe a bit nerdier), so there’ve been excited whispers around the office for months and every now and again you’ll hear the Wagnerian theme music tinning through someone’s headphones (safety volumes, be damned!). We haven’t gone so far as to declare the office a spoiler-free zone, but HR is looking into CA Labor Code to see if it’s feasible.  We figured it would be good to take the temperature of the crew with a little survey on Star Wars past, present and future.

PINT Star Wars Survey

There are few ecosystems more susceptible to interference than those of geek fandom (where every opinion is, how shall we say it…hotly contested), and we didn’t feel confident enough in our Star Wars knowledge to debate minutia so we went with a blatantly satiric and wildly inaccurate poll.

The poll was structured around a few key themes:

• Parsecs
• Womp Rats
• Jar-Jar Binks (never forget)

Participation was decent and nobody got hurt, so we counted it a success, congratulated ourselves on the 15 minutes we killed and turned back to building top-notch sites and web applications.  Only in retrospect did we think that our inclination could have wider appeal, so we sent the poll results over to our buddies at ZingChart.

Star Wars Charts

The ZingChart team was inspired by PINT’s survey and a recent Bloomberg dataviz, so they went down their own lovable nerd rabbit hole and made several charts about Star Wars.

You can view all the interactive charts on the ZingChart blog.

Star Wars and the Web

And we’re not the only web development folks who are excited about this movie. Around the web, we’ve seen:

• Watching Star Wars Will Make You a Better Designer
• [Apple and Star Wars Explain Why the World Around You Looks the Way it Does](http://qz.com/572076/apple-and-star-wars-together-explain-why-the-world-around-you-looks-the-way-it-does/?ref=webdesignernews.com https://venngage.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/STAR-WARS-FINAL-1.jpg?ref=webdesignernews.com)
• 7 Design Principles We Can Learn From Star Wars
• Countdown Timer Until Star Wars: The Force Awakens Opens
• Choose Your Side (Google Themes for the Dark Side or the Light Side)
• Star Wars Flying Game on WebGL
• May the Fonts Be With You

All this led us to the obvious conclusion that as it is in Star Wars, so it is in life. The web is replete with examples of the resonance of its fictional(?) universe pervading our own world, and if you need further proof just compare a young George Lucas’ facial hair to some of your coworkers. Like them or no, it’s pretty hard not to argue that these films have shaped much of our pop culture, and a non-trivial amount of our design and tech aesthetics. For all those reasons (and the excuse to go on for 500+ words about formative childhood films) we’ve offered up this poorest of homages.  Hopefully the ghostly apparitions of of our former Jedi masters are smiling down on us in approval.