New media guidelines for old design problems
A Brief Message has been running some pretty good articles on design; talented high profile authors, interesting discussions, nice illustrations.
But if you step back from the content for a second and notice only the layout: the text in columns, the proportion between the heading and the body type—it’s all great: very good taste and extremely able design choices. But it’s a magazine design. And, for some reason, this design can be considered innovative, although it’s a very traditional magazine style.
This makes me wonder about the possibilities on innovation in web design. I mean true innovation, that is not solely dependant on technical novelties.
One could argue that we see very innovative web sites every day (especially Flash-driven ones), and there are hundreds of galleries and lists all over the web to show it. But what I mean is new design that reinvents the way to address certain problems, the way graphic designers have been able to do for decades, mostly working with the same offset printing paradigm.
A Brief Message introduces itself as, in some ways, a magazine, and most appropriately presents itself that way. But the same as a printed magazine, nonetheless. Other web sites which bring the magazine feel to further distances go as far as using Flash applets that simulate the flipping of pages, as a last resort to present a familiar ‘interface’ to the user.
In his Maeda@media, John Maeda (a major inspiration of mine) emphasizes on how important it is to differentiate the printed dot from the electronic pixel:
Turn off your monitor for a moment. Are the pixels you see gone? Certainly their visual presence is, but their electrical presence is not. This is verified by turning your monitor back on—nothing has changed.
This doesn’t happen to paper. So we can not lay elements out the same way. The impermanence of a pixel, as opposed to the immutability of a printed dot is key in the exercise of letting go of the unquestionable guidelines that have served us a lot for the printed media, and re-purposing some of those principles, along with new ones, to come up with a graphical language that is truly unique to the web.
Our choices should not dry up in endless Flashy animated menus, infinite vertical scrolls, and the occasional subversion that ends up just feeling odd. I have no definite answer, but I sure believe we can do much more. Do you have any ideas? Examples of successful attempts, maybe?
PS: This is not, by any chance, the bashing of the design of A Brief Message. I only used it as a starting point. In fact, I like the visual result of that site a lot.
#1 brunobergher::blog · Past Thoughts » OK, we do 3D… But how do we design for it?, Oct 15, 2007, 3:47 pm: ()
[...] web designers (myself included) ready to design for a 3D web? It’s been not even a week since I wrote on the difficulty most of us have with articulating a new visual language that is truly unique to the web! How could we jump from no letting go of magazines and brochures to [...]