Journal entry
Useless design, part deux
During the few days that has passed since Jon Hicks’ meme, and my rather silly contribution to it, the thought of design being useless has refused to leave my head. The more I think about it, the more I question if it, in some aspects, isn’t actually true after all.
Designers spend hours upon hours focusing on the most trivial of details, because we’re taught that things should look pretty, and things should make it easier for people to achieve something (usually in terms of understanding or using something). This is fine by me. I love details. Heck, I love designing! But aren’t things starting to get just a little bit too much? Let’s go back in time for a moment.
The Old vs. The New
Now, go to your book-shelf and pick up the oldest novel you can find. Open it up, flip through a few pages and take a look. Then, repeat with the most recently released novel you have.
Notice any difference? Sure, the characters are called something else, there’s a different font used on the headers, and the author is clearly using a more updated language. But other than that? No, didn’t think so. The chapters are there, the page numbers, perhaps some sort of table of contents in the beginning. Even the typography is probably roughly the same. That, ladies and gentlemen, is good old simple design, which is so straight forward, beautiful and easy to use, that it has survived for hundreds of years. People don’t even think about it anymore.
But the web is another story. Compare this screenshot with this one. Notice any difference here? That’s the home page of this site, shown with and without the CSS enabled.
The first one is simple, and it’s pretty close to what the web looked like during it’s childhood. Text, black on white. Easy to understand. Just follow the text until it ends, and you’re done. No jumping between different contents. Hey, this is just like the novels I read every day! I get it! And then there’s the second screenshot. The web has changed. A lot.
Back to basics?
The web is such a wonderful medium, and we web designers have so many cool toys to play with. We can do virtually anything (and it’s a great deal of fun doing it). But — comparing those two screenshots, how simple it may be — aren’t we overdoing stuff just a little bit?
I will not be saying that I will live the way I learn here. Designing is great, and I love digging into unnecessary details, just for the fun and good looks of it (let’s just say I’m a big sucker for eye candy). And surely, design is not essentially useless, since it actually helps us all the time, making life a lot easier in many different situations (I even try to make a living out of it). But, if not only to achieve a great deal of usability and accessibility, maybe it’s time to realize that we may tend to over-complicate things a bit on the web. Do users need drop down menus, visual effects, and so on?
And therefore, I think at least web design can be pretty useless. The guys that once discovered the standard layout of the novel all did it! And everybody already know how to use it. Why change it? Yes, the web can be much more complex in it’s information structure than a novel. But still, most of the time the design can be so much more simple.
No, I’m heading back to the sofa and the novel I’m reading. Back to the simple, black and white, follow-the-letters-until-there-are-no-more heaven.
- Published September 19th, 2006 at 1:38 pm
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- Categorized in: Webdesign
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Comments (2)
RSS feed1. alex said this on November 9th, 2006, 7:06 pm
On the one hand I agree with you when you wonder if we are actually overdoing things. My motto has been and still is “Less is More”, and design should be the tool the user interacts with to access information or relate to his environment. On the other hand however, what makes design interesting is the multiple ways we can achieve the goal of making a website accesible w/o making it look boring or simple; or how we can motivate someone to read the newspaper by creating an interesting layout -which otherwise would be too boring to the eye. In a world where more and more people are increasingly becoming (highly) visually literate, going back to basics, if not done with a strategy in mind, would only render the effort useless.
2. Olof Lönnroth said this on November 10th, 2006, 3:05 pm
alex: I know what you’re saying, and I agree. Of course we are not going back to basics in the sense of making everything look like it did years ago. That would be stupid, really. But going back can also result in a forward motion, if done, as you suggested, “with a strategy in mind”. And overdoing things can, of course, also be successful with the right strategy in mind (or a bit luck).
What I mean is that going back to basics not necessarily have to mean being conservative or uncreative. It can also become a leap forward.
I think people often try to come up with completely new things just for the sake of being revolutionary, without thinking about what people already know about, and without using the great amount of knowledge that is already out there. You can often transform something completely unusable into something very accessible, just by making some small detail remind people of something else they already know how to use (just take the desktop metaphor used in most operating systems today as an example). That’s leaping forward with the help of back-to-basics-thinking to me.