Hi David and Gunnar,
The idea of creating 'rules' (also rules of thumb and heuristics and
'procedures') is a core part of all professional practices. Sure in graphic
design there have been developed many many 'rules' especially in relation to
typography.
I'm suggesting, however, that the shift to recent web technologies requires
a very different sort of approach to 'rules' in which the older ways of
thinking about rules in visual appearances are part of a different game from
when the appearance of a design was fixed and created by the designer rather
than automatically constructed by software in a highly variable manner.
Gunnar's quote ' Graphic designers often feel helpless when they find
themselves in the role of visual dishwashers for the Information Architect
chefs' made sense in the days when appearance and structure of a webpage was
fixed and websites were composed of pre-written webpages coded in html with
links between them to form the navigation. That's no longer the case and
I'm unclear that graphic designers and the old styles of visual rule making
apply much in the design of database-driven websites. Convince me!
1. Graphic designers don't seem to be trained to have and understanding of
creating dynamic logic of automatically composed (and recomposed) visual
appearance as found in database-driven website design. For example, I'm not
sure many graphic design graduates could say to construct a basic dynamic
intelligent visual template for e.g. Drupal or Typo3. (For instructions see
http://api.drupal.org/api/drupal/includes--theme.inc/function/template_prepr
ocess/7
http://api.drupal.org/api/drupal/includes--theme.inc/function/template_prepr
ocess_page/7
http://api.drupal.org/api/drupal/includes--common.inc/function/drupal_render
_page/7
http://api.drupal.org/api/drupal/modules--system--system.api.php/function/ho
ok_page_alter/7
http://api.drupal.org/api/drupal/modules--system--system.api.php/function/ho
ok_page_build/7 etc). My experience has been of graphic designers lack of
understanding on these kind of issues and problems from that lack of
understanding in all other aspects of website design beyond visual design.
May be I'm out of date. Please correct me if I'm wrong and creating this
kind of structure of the dynamic visual logic of a database-driven website
is nowadays part of a typical graphic design degree.
2. Contrary to what David wrote. The visual design issues do not need to be
addressed at all until the rest of a database-driven website is completed.
Website appearance and the logic of its dynamics are wholly and separately
determined by the visual template files which are uploaded later after the
website is completed. That is why one can totally change the visual
appearance of a database-driven website in seconds simply by changing the
visual logic templates- see for example http://www.csszengarden.com/
I can understand the political drive of graphic designers to bid for design
team leadership but practically I'm unconvinced in relation to
database-driven website design except for a small number of exceptions of
graphic designers with excellent mathematically-based technical skills. From
experience, it's not clear to me yet why one would trust a graphic designer
for leading a data-base driven website design team when their training does
not appear to give them the overall understanding - and the graphic
design work is so exclusively packaged into one single aspect of the
process.
I'm open to being convinced. I know a PhD student who is visually-trained
and is leading a substantial data-base driven website design team for a
large company - but he also has high-level engineering and software
development skills. Do you have examples, and are the other members of the
design team happy with the graphic design leadership?
My reason for pressing so hard to tease out the details on this is it has
PhD-level research implications for research into complex design practice,
particularly in light of the increasing automatisation of creative aspects
of graphic design. The argument could go either way. With increased
automation might be argued that increased human input and oversight by
trained graphic designers is essential in a highly automated visual
production environment... or not.
Best wishes,
Terry
____________________
Dr. Terence Love, FDRS, AMIMechE, PMACM, MISI
Senior Lecturer, Design
Researcher, Social Program Evaluation Research Unit
Edith Cowan University, Perth, Western Australia
Mob: 0434 975 848, Fax +61(0)8 9305 7629, [log in to unmask]
Senior lecturer, Dept of Design
Curtin University, Perth, Western Australia
Director, Design-based Research Unit, Design Out Crime Research Centre
Honorary Researcher, Institute of Entrepreneurship and Enterprise
Development
Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK
____________________
-----Original Message-----
From: PhD-Design - This list is for discussion of PhD studies and related
research in Design [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Gunnar
Swanson
Sent: Wednesday, 2 November 2011 3:49 AM
To: Dr Terence Love
Subject: Re: The shoemaker'c children: designers who produce lousy web pages
Terry,
On Nov 1, 2011, at 11:57 AM, Terence Love wrote:
[snip]
> The assumption that web design is primarily an issue of graphic design is
> not obvious.
[snip]
> The question is, where does the graphic designer contribute to these kinds
> of website design? What is their best role?
Just time for a quick note.
I wrote a piece for Steve Heller's -The Education of an E-Designer- back in
2000 about my students who didn't want to have anything to do with designing
for the web. <http://www.gunnarswanson.com/writing/WebVsDesign.pdf> Just to
prove that I've degenerated into a completely pompous fool, I'll quote me:
"Graphic designers often feel helpless when they find themselves in the role
of visual dishwashers for the Information Architect chefs. What does that do
for graphic designers or, perhaps more important, what does it do for
graphic design? It depends, of course, on who runs, leads, or guides the
teams. Leaders will be people with an understanding of the overall process
but that could be someone with a background in design, computer programming,
business administration-you name it. As the man said, go to an architect
with a problem and you'll get a building as a solution; the background of
team leaders will greatly affect outcomes. As a graphic designer, I can't
help but hope for someone with a design perspective in charge."
So my short answer is that the answers to your questions are political but,
like most things political, the results are real. If (good) graphic
designers play a central role fairly early, things we recognize as important
will be addressed. If we do not, they probably won't be. That will have real
effects on the project result. I suspect that you and I would not always
agree on how laudable or lamentable the effects are in specific cases.
Gunnar
----------
Gunnar Swanson Design Office
1901 East 6th Street
Greenville NC 27858
USA
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