Maybe the thought of such lame activity brings a smug smile to your face. It’s the sort of thing you just can’t admit to and stay fashionable.

What on earth’s it got to do with new media culture, anyway? Such homely, farmhouse crafts just don’t cut it when you can take a digital camera snap or a scan of some random object, mangle it with the face of a soon-to-be ex-friend in Photoshop and print up your own t-shirt. Out with the homemade jam and in with the paper jam.

But let’s take a different look at this – please bear with me while I take you on a digital detour for a moment. There have been some interesting developments in digital culture recently. We have seen an explosion in the use and production of bitmap fonts, which don’t expand and contract easily like normal fonts but are designed to be viewed on screen as small and crisp as possible. These allow designers to take the crazy amounts of text information given to them by demanding clients and cram it into the limited screen space available while still preserving precious white space. (This is essential to allow a design to breathe and therefore remain interesting and readable, if you’ve yet to hear a designer throw a wobbly about it. If you are a designer, you’ll probably be shaking your head in sad recognition at this point.)

At first these fonts emerged for practical reasons but soon became a mark of slick style and ultra-modern design on the web (we shall put aside for a moment the fact that they are not accessible to those readers with impaired vision.) They are constructed not with curves, as the traditional font has always been, but simply by carving a letter out of a block of say, 10 by 10 pixels, much like the way text is displayed on the tiny monochrome lcd screens of mobile phones.

Designing these – along with graphics and icons – far from being slavishly boring, is curiously relaxing and addictive. It’s like relieving stress systematically with a sheet of bubble wrap, but producing something pretty and intricate at the same time. Add in the kudos of announcing you’re doing interactive design, and you’ve got a winning formula for whiling away the hours – and, dare I say it, making money on the side.

With sites like Warp Records (www.warp-net.com) and Flipflopflyin (www.flipflopflyin.com – the minipops section especially) now going down in the history of the web, pixel popping has become a major art form. Recognisable celebrities are rendered in 4 jagged colours and only one centimetre square. Like the appeal of small things in the real world- spider mites, micromachines, puppies, mobile phones- pixel art definitely has the greatest emotional power per square inch.

And yet, for all the machismo of the webdesign industry, with its appalling gender imbalance, the technique itself differs very little from making a cross-stitch sampler – a talent which goes back hundreds of years and was purely the realm of uneducated adolescent girls. You’ve got to admit it, boys, it’s not so uncool. There’s a bit of passion for traditional craft in all of us.

Whether icons would go down well at your local church sale of work, though, remains to be seen.

Think back to the moment when you first heard all the fuss about the net. For your humble author the first memory is of seeing the film Jumping Jack Flash – and it’s not so much memorable for the image of Whoopi Goldberg brandishing a mansize toothbrush against an unknown intruder, (which has its merits) but for the fact that the plot effectively hinged on her character instant messaging a spy trapped in Russia.

Perhaps you recall soundbites like “This is the beginning of end for the postal system/business air travel/commuting…” and other such ridiculous hype. It seemed almost reasonable, yet now we laugh cynically at such innocence.

However, there was a seed of truth in those statements, which is probably why so many of us swallowed them at the time. The kernel of it was that the internet collapses space. Its magical combination of electricity, protocols and hardware, strung out across the globe, really do make Moscow seem as close to us as the PC in the next room.

So, what did the great design minds do with this remarkable inversion of geography? They said “Let’s make a virtual gallery you can wander round” or “Let’s make a virtual nightclub.” Suddenly with such clumsy reproductions of the real world online, we had all its disadvantages (having to travel from one place to another in real time) with none of the advantages (the texture of a painting, the feel of a pint glass, and other luxuries which I shall let you imagine in your own time.)

For some reason this desire to imitate travel still persists. Almost every fledgling webdesigner at some point suggests a navigation system based on rooms or spaces. (Go into the conference room and you can see the press releases. Go into the telephone booth and you get contact information.)

Forget it! Physical dimensions are not what networked IT does well, and it’s certainly not an advantage (unless you are playing Tomb Raider, in which case you may be glad there’s a metre of virtual stone between you and some rabid wolf.) What if you wanted to compare differing sets of information, or change the order and grouping of images in our virtual gallery? On the web this becomes immediately possible, but it renders the metaphor superfluous at best; counter-intuitive at worst.

Information and 3d space can rarely, if ever, be combined to good effect. Many extremely talented designers have tried to solve complex navigation and data representation problems, such as menus with many layers and interlinking options, by creating a kind of space which you can circumnavigate or zoom in and out of the text. But if you can find me a casual web user that understands what on earth is going on with these things, I promise to eat that very man-size toothbrush.

Not so long ago, Apple announced that in their development of the next version of Mac OS, they were exploring a new desktop metaphor which was not based on two dimensions but three. Everybody danced around excitedly on reading the press release. But what happened? We ended up with beveled icons and little folders that look like they’re standing up on the desktop. Cute, but not exactly a quantum leap.

I could be wrong about this. But one thing’s for sure, you’d have to spend a lot more money than Apple did to prove it.