Understanding Web Design

We get better design when we understand our medium. Yet
even at this late cultural hour, many people don’t understand web
design. Among them can be found some of our most distinguished business
and cultural leaders, including a few who possess a profound grasp of
design—except as it relates to the web.

Some who don’t
understand web design nevertheless have the job of creating websites or
supervising web designers and developers. Others who don’t understand
web design are nevertheless professionally charged with evaluating it
on behalf of the rest of us. Those who understand the least make the
most noise. They are the ones leading charges, slamming doors, and
throwing money—at all the wrong people and things.

If we want better sites, better work, and better-informed clients, the need to educate begins with us.

Preferring real estate to architecture

It’s hard to
understand web design when you don’t understand the web. And it’s hard
to understand the web when those who are paid to explain it either
don’t get it themselves, or are obliged for commercial reasons to
suppress some of what they know, emphasizing the Barnumesque over the
brilliant.

The news media too often gets it wrong. Too
much internet journalism follows the money; too little covers art and
ideas. Driven by editors pressured by publishers worried about
vanishing advertisers, even journalists who understand the web spend
most of their time writing about deals and quoting dealmakers. Many do
this even when the statement they’re quoting is patently self-serving
and ludicrous—like Zuckerberg’s Law.

It’s
not that Zuckerberg’s not news; and it’s not that business isn’t some
journalists’ beat. But focusing on business to the exclusion of all
else is like reporting on real estate deals while ignoring architecture.

And
one tires of the news narrative’s one-dimensionalism. In 1994, the web
was weird and wild, they told us. In ‘99 it was a kingmaker; in ‘01, a
bust. In ‘02, news folk discovered blogs; in ‘04, perspiring guest
bloggers on CNN explained how citizen
journalists were reinventing news and democracy and would determine who
won that year’s presidential election. I forget how that one turned out.

When
absurd predictions die ridiculous deaths, nobody resigns from the
newsroom, they just throw a new line into the water—like marketers
replacing a slogan that tanked. After decades of news commoditization,
what’s amazing is how many good reporters there still are, and how hard
many try to lay accurate information before the public. Sometimes you
can almost hear it beneath the roar of the grotesque and the
exceptional.

The sustainable circle of self-regard

News media are
not the only ones getting it wrong. Professional associations get it
wrong every day, and commemorate their wrongness with an annual
festival. Each year, advertising and design magazines and professional
organizations hold contests for “new media design” judged by the
winners of last year’s competitions. That they call it “new media
design” tells them nothing and you and me everything.

Although
there are exceptions, for the most part the creators of winning entries
see the web as a vehicle for advertising and marketing campaigns in
which the user passively experiences Flash and video content. For the
active user, there is gaming—but what you and I think of as active web
use is limited to clicking a “Digg this page” button.

The
winning sites look fabulous as screen shots in glossy design annuals.
When the winners become judges, they reward work like their own. Thus
sites that behave like TV and look good between covers continue to be
created, and a generation of clients and art directors thinks that
stuff is the cream of web design.

Design critics get it wrong, too

People who are smart
about print can be less bright about the web. Their critical faculties,
honed to perfection during the Kerning Wars, smash to bits against the
barricades of our profession.

The less sophisticated
lament on our behalf that we are stuck with ugly fonts. They wonder
aloud how we can enjoy working in a medium that offers us less than
absolute control over every atom of the visual experience. What they
are secretly asking is whether or not we are real designers. (They
suspect that we are not.) But these are the juniors, the design
students and future critics. Their opinions are chiefly of interest to
their professors, and one prays they have good ones.

More
sophisticated critics understand that the web is not print and that
limitations are part of every design discipline. Yet even these
eggheads will sometimes succumb to fallacious comparatives. (I’ve done it myself,
although long ago and strictly for giggles.) Where are the masterpieces
of web design, these critics cry. That Google Maps might be as
representative of our age as the Mona Lisa was of Leonardo’s—and as
brilliant, in its way—satisfies many of us as an answer, but might not
satisfy the design critic in search of a direct parallel to, oh, I
don’t know, let’s say Milton Glaser’s iconic Bob Dylan poster.

Typography, architecture, and web design

The trouble
is, web design, although it employs elements of graphic design and
illustration, does not map to them. If one must compare the web to
other media, typography would be a better choice. For a web design,
like a typeface, is an environment for someone else’s expression. Stick
around and I’ll tell you which site design is like Helvetica.

Architecture
(the kind that uses steel and glass and stone) is also an apt
comparison—or at least, more apt than poster design. The architect
creates planes and grids that facilitate the dynamic behavior of
people. Having designed, the architect relinquishes control. Over time,
the people who use the building bring out and add to the meaning of the
architect’s design.

Of course, all comparisons are gnarly
by nature. What is the “London Calling” of television? Who is the Jane
Austen of automotive design? Madame Butterfly is not less beautiful for
having no car chase sequence, peanut butter no less tasty because it
cannot dance.

So what is web design?

Web design is not book design,
it is not poster design, it is not illustration, and the highest
achievements of those disciplines are not what web design aims for.
Although websites can be delivery systems for games and videos, and
although those delivery systems can be lovely to look at, such sites
are exemplars of game design and video storytelling, not of web design.
So what is web design?

Web design is the creation of
digital environments that facilitate and encourage human activity;
reflect or adapt to individual voices and content; and change
gracefully over time while always retaining their identity.

Let’s repeat that, with emphasis:

Web
design is the creation of digital environments that facilitate and
encourage human activity; reflect or adapt to individual voices and
content; and change gracefully over time while always retaining their
identity.

She walks in beauty

Great web designs are like great typefaces: some, like Rosewood, impose a personality on whatever content is applied to them. Others, like Helvetica,
fade into the background (or try to), cally supporting whatever
tone the content provides. (We can argue tomorrow whether Helvetica is
really as neutral as water.)

Which web design is like that? For one, Douglas Bowman’s white “Minima” layout for Blogger, used by literally millions of writers—and it feels like it was designed for each of them individually. That is great design.

Great
web designs are like great buildings. All office buildings, however
distinctive, have lobbies and bathrooms and staircases. Websites, too,
share commonalities.

Although a great site design is
completely individual, it is also a great deal like other site designs
that perform similar functions. The same is true of great magazine and
newspaper layouts, which differ from banal magazine and newspaper
layouts in a hundred subtle details. Few celebrate great magazine
layouts, yet millions consciously or unconsciously appreciate them, and
nobody laments that they are not posters.

The
inexperienced or insufficiently thoughtful designer complains that too
many websites use grids, too many sites use columns, too many sites are
“boxy.” Efforts to avoid boxiness have been around since 1995; while
occasionally successful, they have most often produced aesthetically
wretched and needlessly unusable designs.

The experienced
web designer, like the talented newspaper art director, accepts that
many projects she works on will have headers and columns and footers.
Her job is not to whine about emerging commonalities but to use them to
create pages that are distinctive, natural, brand-appropriate, subtly
memorable, and quietly but unmistakably engaging.

If she
achieves all that and sweats the details, her work will be beautiful.
If not everyone appreciates this beauty—if not everyone understands web
design—then let us not cry for web design, but for those who cannot
see.