Description: Successful design strikes the balance between form and message. When that balance is threatened by generic templates and design sameness, even the most thoughtful messages can come off as generic and insincere. Learn how design can be a supportive storyteller (not just a passive bystander).
Good design is about telling a story. By nature we try to define what we are looking at.
Design should reinforce the story.
Example: An old video game with crappy graphics is hard to visualize but the cover of the game has nice graphics and puts you in the right mindset for the game. Now you image the crappy graphics as good graphics from the cover.
Wired magazine does a good job of setting the mood for the story in the magazine but online it doesn't translate. We lose the images and colours and fonts. Everything is just dumped into a CMS and published.
"We've distilled stories down to content."
"Design can't not communicate." Every pixel, line, image communicates, good or bad, intentional or not.
These days layouts are all the same, logos are all the same. Everything is just dumped into a CMS.
Why is it all the same? Only 5 font typefaces on the web? Are web designers not designers? Old printing presses only had a handful of typefaces but they managed to make beautiful art.
Should we design harder? Why are there no landmark web designs? We all start with a blank page, why do our designs all look the same? Why aren't they amazing, landmarks?
We look at what's good in print and try to copy that on the web. Until the web all visual story telling has been done on something physical (walls, caves, paper).
The web presents new problems so we need new solutions. When books were around someone had to invent a 2-page spread, it didn't exist before Ladislav Suntar invented it!
With the web we have no constraints. With print we know how big the page is going to be. With the web everything is variable. It's hard to grasp what's on a website, you view all the content through a tiny window.
A website is like all pages of a book on one page; front cover, table of contents, content pages, back cover, all at the same time.
In print we have rules, ratios, but it's not the same on the web. Current design ideals rely on predictable dimensions.
What are web designers doing to push the story being told?
Some innovative sites:
jason's site uses easy hooks (almost like a framework) for simple, fast art direction.
The web is still immature. It's like when cars were first invented, the model T only came in black because colour wasn't as important as making sure the car didn't blow up.
Web design has been driven by technology instead of the message, the story.
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Note: I wrote this live blog after the fact from notes I "scribbled" on a piece of paper.
Matt
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