Archive for April, 2008
Wednesday, April 30th, 2008
There are merely the illusion of trends. A trend is a term for whatever the stylists are copying en masse at the time. What are stylists? Stylists are people who are technically proficient with the tools of the trade to create design, but lack knowledge of the design process. Rather than applying the process they simply find something they find cool at the time and reproduce a spin-off of it.
When you create something along the lines of the Web 2.0 look, or a hand drawn look for example, you are assigning attributes to whatever the content happens to be that may or may not be appropriate. Design communicates a visual message to a viewer, and when you communicate the wrong thing, you are failing your client.
In fact, this type of ‘design’ devalues real design. Just look across the blogosphere, look at the bountiful amount of Web 2.0 style sites for companies which have no qualities that fit the stigma that comes with Web 2.0; it just looks pretty. Look at the dozens of illustrative, organic feeling designs that have popped up recently. Someone told me that super-sized text is a new trend (when the size of type is considered a trend, may the Swiss have mercy on our souls).
To put it in one sentence, I really love Wikipedia’s definition of design:
Designing normally requires a designer to consider the aesthetic, functional, and many other aspects of an object or a process, which usually requires considerable research, thought, modeling, interactive adjustment, and re-design.
Everybody’s Doing It!
No. No, they’re not. Think of the industry rockstars; none of their sites look like each others or any others for that matter. There are many knock-offs but they all pale in comparison to the original design. The reason why the remakes can never ascend to that level of design is because the design is no longer communicating. Each personal site design visually encapsulates the personas of many of these people:
None of the above three sites look the same, nor will you find any other prominent designer’s sites mimicking their style. Can you imagine, say, a law firm in Shaun Inman’s design? No. Even though the site is very clean and professional, it has a certain quality to it that is particular to Shaun. This is the core foundation of design, the very thing that separates the designer from bloke who figured out how to save as HTML from Microsoft Word. Creating anything with disregard to emotions, preconceptions, and message is not design.
If the people many of us look up to are coming up with great visual communications which succeed at communicating the proper ideas, shouldn’t we be following suit? If you do believe in trends, maybe the next one should be unique and communicative.
Posted in Design, Identity | 32 Comments »
Thursday, April 24th, 2008
As someone who is always reading three books at a time, I’ve read more than a fair few of books on aspects of the web design industry. Unfortunately I think quite a few of them are duds; while others are particularly good. So good in fact, that I lend them out frequently to friends. Recently, one of them asked me for a list of the ones that I thought were the best, and I thought I would share it here as well.
Designing the Obvious was the book that created my passion for user interface design. Many of the principles within the book drive my thoughts about the tandem of simplicity and user experience. As far as application interface design goes, there is no better book for theory. That said, the information in the book is applicable to all facets of interactive design. The title itself, is pretty self-explanatory (obviously!) and the book makes for a good read, rather than being overly technical.
A must-have for anyone working with front-end design on the internet, Krug’s book has aged particularly well. The examples are in most cases no longer on the internet, but the principles and ideologies are still very relevant. If you don’t own this book and you do any form of web design, you need to at the very least borrow this from the library; though you’ll probably want a copy as your bible. My copy is getting pretty dirty on the covers.
Brendan Dawes is a curious man. Analog In, Digital Out is a book about interaction – sort of. Dawes takes a look at how every day events can be information that can be harnessed to produce designs, and frequently challenges the way we see computers today. The examples in book even include snippets of code to reproduce what he has made. Reading this book opens a new way of abstract thinking. Someone is going to read this one day and create some sort of technological marvel.
This book introduced me to the world of typography. Over time I’ve found that nearly any book on typography repeats the history of type for the first half of the book, and while this one is no exception, it presents it in an interesting manner. The examples and explanations are more manageable than The Elements of Typographic Style and I would highly recommend this as a starting point for those interested in learning more about typography.
Posted in Design, Personal, Typography, Usability, Wordpress | 13 Comments »
Tuesday, April 15th, 2008
When the clock starts rolling around noon and stomachs start rumbling, lunch is on the mind. Delivery orders are placed, and you wait. Well, due to some poor design decisions on the lunch form I waited a long time. Worse yet, I was left disgruntled at the end of the situation, all because of poor form design; I ended up faxing the order form to their phone number.
The problem is pretty simple, but twofold. First, why a lightning bolt for a fax machine icon? Granted, there’s no hard rule about what to use as a fax icon, but this one is pretty suspicious. What’s worse is the layout of the next sentence. Notice that Fax is under the phone icon, and call is under the confusing fax icon. Mix in a bit of a rush and just glancing at the sheet while it’s in a fax tray and you have a recipe for disaster.
If you look even closer you can see the word Fax again underneath itself, and again under the phone icon.
The problem is easily solved, and one could say that putting the phone number in the far right helps increase it’s prominence due to it’s proximity to the edge of the page. A second benefit is that it reinforces the process they want you to follow: fax first, then call.
While the food was late, it was still tasty. I’ve eaten at Potbelly enough to be a repeat customer, so this wasn’t enough to put me off. But think of all the new customers that may never reach the point of repeat customer if they suffer a similar folly? Just another example of why good design pays off.
Anyone else had a similar experience with offline forms? Personally I find it interesting that such mistakes are probably still made in the online world. To be honest, until you’re a victim of such a situation or have someone tell you about it, I’m not sure it’s one of the issues you could catch easily!
Edit: By request I’ve uploaded the full .pdf of the menu for readers. For educational use only!
Posted in Personal, Usability | 8 Comments »
Sunday, April 13th, 2008
This redesign was sparked by quite a few things. But what truly set it off was coming across a post on Greg Storey’s Airbag. To summarize, he writes about a moment of nostalgia of the pre-web 2.0 era; back when the visual differences between sites were vast and everyone worked to be unique in some way or another.
I absolutely loved reading the post (even though it is from 2006) and decided to push Astheria.com to be a little different from other blogs. Fortunately, this sat pretty well with me since I wanted to pull the articles out of the mess of lesser posts anyway. This makes things a little different on its own but I hope it will drastically improve the findability of what most people are going to care about. There are no longer sections for metadata or categories, and the archives are a bit radical. It’s still a blog, it still has a relatively conservative layout, but it’s a step in the right direction I think.
I have some interesting thoughts regarding the use of human computation and blogs that I didn’t have time to address in depth, and that’s something I’ll be working on behind the scenes for a while. Look for it in the future.
A Work in Progress
For now, I’m still working on tweaking and fixing for different browsers, but I’d love some feedback. It’s going to take a good bit of polish to bring this to the level of the previous design.
Posted in Design, Personal, This Site | 36 Comments »
Cameron Moll’s site, Authentic Boredom; Classy, yet personable.
Elliot Jay Stock’s site; Edgy, a little bit of rebellion.
Shaun Inman’s site; Crisp, clean, minty.
The offender? A lightning bolt icon indicating the fax number and some poor ordering
My revised order form
The bowl of chili and sandwich, only 60 minutes later than I had hoped!