Terry,
On Nov 3, 2011, at 6:57 AM, Terence Love wrote:
> 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!
It was, of course, written "in the days" and much of the article is fairly archaic. Some of it still applies.
If you're asking me to claim that most graphic designers are equipped to head the development of complex dynamic websites, I'll have to say no. I am not one to claim that designers (graphic designers or otherwise), by nature of being designers, are equipped to do anything and everything. I doubt that the answer would be yes if we exchanged in any broad field for "graphic design" in the first sentence of this paragraph. What I was trying to say is that people start somewhere and that start has a big influence on where they go.
In the article I mentioned in an aside in an earlier post, Dana Cuff interviewed several architects about how they thought about the people who would use their buildings. Spoiler alert: Most of them really didn't think about them and certainly didn't think of them as people. Cuff is a planner rather than an architect so (at the risk of stepping on architect toes) was more likely to ask the question. I have no doubt that graphic designers have giant blind spots and massive areas of ignorance on projects like the ones you describe. So does everyone else. If everyone does her best to adjust the rear view mirrors and eliminate the blind spots, the old patterns will still have an effect.
If I had to sum up the "visual dishwashers" article in two sentences they would be: (1) If websites don't tend to reflect the aspirations of graphic designers, the solution is graphic designers changing that. (2) Doing so will change graphic designers but I hope they will keep (1) in mind.
I don't know if I could convince you that graphic design has important insights and I suspect that this is not the format to try to convince you. I'm also probably not the person best qualified to be specific to the subject so I won't take up your challenge.
Gunnar
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