Historiarum

I enjoyed Dave Shea’s comments at 24 ways. These were some problems I was working through on my site last week. I originally had a light tan as a border, The darker color seems to both frame and focus the content much better (is that what framing does?)

This week I find Luke Wroblewski’s opening paragraph extremely thought provoking. He writes:

The World Wide Web is awash with sterile design solutions. Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Dell, Microsoft, and countless others are virtually indistinguishable from each other (similar layout, similar color scheme). Though one might say that this uniformity makes web browsing easier by virtue of a standardized interface, the reality is such sites create mundane experiences for their users and fail to make a positive connection with their audience.

I have been thinking quite a bit about the similarity that is often found on websites. Sometimes, it seems like there is a bit of groupthink going on, and I think that might be part of the story. There becomes an understanding of how people tend to use the internet, some articles and maybe books are written, and it becomes a de facto standard on the web. This can obviously be useful at times, e.g. comprehending that screens are much more difficult to read from than paper, and so interesting textual colors might make for a tedious and/or painful user experience.

But I imagine there is more. We talk a good deal about the collaborative nature of the web. There seems to be a culture of sharing as well. We peruse the web and everywhere are aspects of design that attract us. Oh, I like that nav bar. And that organizational structure is clarifying. Wow, those colors go together really well! And so on.

This seems at first glance a little antithetical to the creative process, but I think in fact its indicative of something else. While creative acts often are products of individual work, they almost always derive from other works. Often, the best of them borrow less or more aptly hide their sources. But plenty of inspiring creations have been made reusing and refining other material (see Marcel Duchamp for one of my personal favorites). The web has opened up the world of publishing to many not simply by making it possible for people to present material. But the tools and science of the trade are now on full display. With a pages source code always available, it becomes possible to extract and reproduce elements of design, and I think the proliferation of similar design trends evidences this.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Often it contributes to ease of use and comprehension. But I think as we enter the design world it bears remembering that we should be critical and questioning of what we encounter, and willing to make choices that might buck trends if they seem reasonable to us. For what we see might not always be what we see.

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Footnotes present a frustrating problem of presentation on the web. A traditional, bottom–of–the–page footnote is not technically possible since a webpage has little similarity to the pages of a book which are of a specific, rather than interminable size. The tendency seems toward adopting an endnote approach on the web, placing all notation at the very end of the work, sometimes using links so a reader might flip back and forth between the text and notation.

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Luke Wroblewski’s equation of brand with personality seems a questionable analogy. Personalities are full of complexities and contradictions, can change on a whim and be held in check. Brands, on the other hand, strive for simplicity and consistency. This is not to say branding is not ever useful, but with regard to human endeavors it seems a limiting concept at best. If you are interested in selling yourself to the internet audience, then branding is likely a worthwhile approach. A site through in which you might attempt to represent more than a few of your personality characteristics seemingly would contain a variety of looks and feels. The first approach seems akin to wearing the same clothes everyday, which is fine for some.

As I mentioned on Laura’s blog design is important, but it can’t be everything. More to the point the idea of design combined with branding becomes an easily abused model(for example companies like BP claiming environmental stewardship). Design, visual appeal, ease of use are all important, but I think if we are ultimately helping promote surface over depth and appeal over content, we are benefitting those who hope to use design to manipulate rather than serve.

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