Hi,
Interesting thread ..and here is one chance to introduce Van Halen as an
analogy >>
*"Van Halen did dozens of shows every year, and at each venue, the band
would show up with nine 18-wheelers full of gear. Because of the technical
complexity, the band's standard contract with venues was thick and
convoluted -- Roth, in his inimitable way, said in his autobiography that
it read "like a version of the Chinese Yellow Pages." A typical "article"
in the contract might say, "There will be 15 amperage voltage sockets at
20-foot spaces, evenly, providing 19 amperes."*
*Van Halen buried a special clause in the middle of the contract. It was
called Article 126. It read, "There will be no brown M&Ms in the backstage
area, upon pain of forfeiture of the show, with full compensation." So when
Roth would arrive at a new venue, he'd walk backstage and glance at the M&M
bowl. If he saw a brown M&M, he'd demand a line check of the entire
production. "Guaranteed you're going to arrive at a technical error," he
wrote. "They didn't read the contract.... Sometimes it would threaten to
just destroy the whole show."*
*In other words, Roth was no diva. He was an operations expert. He couldn't
spend hours every night checking the amperage of each socket. He needed a
way to assess quickly whether the stagehands at each venue were paying
attention -- whether they had read every word of the contract and taken it
seriously. In Roth's world, a brown M&M was the canary in the coal mine."*
- Excerpt from "
http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/143/made-to-stick-the-telltale-brown-mampm.html"
So how is this story relevant here?
To make a comparison, the font may be a small issue in the holistic view of
a massive website but similar to Van Halen's strategically positioned brown
M n Ms, the readability itself may be the 'Canary in the coal mine' the are
hints to certain problems in the web structure as a whole. For me, the
readability of my own school's website was an important factor in assessing
the pedagogy and the system of the school, because that content is the main
frontier people deal with apart from hearsay.
It was an M and M factor that told me the school has design thinking
thoroughly embedded in the system, since they got the basic things right,
namely readability (just like Don was implying). : / First impressions are
superfast and based on basic cognitive capabilities like readability and
meaning (usually conveyed through type on a website like that) than any
other aspect (or deeper arguments) that one doesn't need to care about. On
the other hand, it could be the intention to keep fonts the way it is
represented, maybe Im just a "young" guy who is old fashioned. Also dont
know if I make sense or am I trolling here? :D
cheers and thanks for the provocations, :)
R
On Tue, Nov 1, 2011 at 5:57 PM, Terence Love <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Dear Gunnar,
>
> In rethinking the role of graphic designers in website design there
> appears
> some benefit standing back a little .
> Three points stand out:
> 1. Web design is taught to and practiced as design by professionals and
> students in Management Information Systems (MIS), Information Systems(IS),
> Computer Studies, ICT, software professionals, EBusiness MBAs, multiple
> fields of Engineering, Artists, multiple Social Science professions,
> Multimedia professionals, film-makers, journalists - and graphic designers.
> The assumption that web design is primarily an issue of graphic design is
> not obvious.
> 2. Most of the web-design in the world today comprises database-driven
> websites in which the graphic appearance is managed by a suite of rules;
> where there are no webpages; and where content is assembled, formatted and
> presented on the fly in an interactive manner that also involves aligning
> the rules with the properties of the appliance on which it is viewed. The
> display of the website is also automatically reformatted depending on the
> current state of content being displayed (i.e. columns may be added or
> removed, line lengths changed, font sizes adjusted etc on the fly depending
> on the interactions between different content elements)
> 3. You hit the nail with your reference to AI-driven websites. For some
> years, this has been commonplace. Database-driven websites have for many
> years had a simple AI engine to manage the moment by moment formatting and
> reformatting of the appearance of content and users' interaction with the
> website. This AI-driven process identifies the viewing appliance
> characteristics, the structure of the multiple content elements (and
> software interventions) being presented on screen and provides a different
> set of formatting rules for the display engine to format the content on
> that appliance.
>
> The question is, where does the graphic designer contribute to these kinds
> of website design? What is their best role?
>
> For middle-scale database-driven websites (which is what I'm most familiar
> with), the appearance of the content is managed by a collection of CSS
> rules
> collated into a 'template'. Contributing to (rather than designing) this
> template is probably the main point of input for a graphic designer in
> these
> kinds of websites (which are apparently around half of the web). The
> formal
> definitions of rule and formatting structures by which that 'visual
> styling' is translated into displays for a variety of circumstances is
> at different level of design. In addition is the composition of the
> information structure and its navigation and there there appears to be
> another contributory role for graphic designers. My experience has been
> that this is not necessarily, however, a strength for graphic designers
> who
> specialise in visual aesthetics particularly when content items are in the
> thousands with many different types, and menu navigation that may involve
> hundreds of possible choices by the user.
>
> To be a design 'control freak' in this web design environment means to
> control the rules that define the creation of lower level rules and
> automated decision-making processes that shape how content is assembled on
> screen. This is very different from the idea of tightly defining the
> aesthetic appearance of a fixed web page.
>
> A second interesting question is at what stage in a database-driven web
> design project is best to seek input and draw on the skills of graphic
> designers? My feeling, and experience over the last few years, is that it
> works best if graphic designers join the design team after the website
> organisation, structure, navigation and content has been created and the
> baseline usability has been settled, i.e. when the website is already up
> and running. I'd welcome your thoughts on this.
>
> 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 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: Sunday, 30 October 2011 1:12 AM
> To: Dr Terence Love
> Subject: Re: The shoemaker'c children: designers who produce lousy web
> pages
>
> On Oct 29, 2011, at 10:43 AM, Terence Love wrote:
> > Web design problems can be more 'wrong design profession' rather than a
> > font size issue.
> >
> > It occurs when web design is done by print-based graphic designers.
>
> Terry,
>
> Early limits on the visual display of websites led to a couple of distinct
> approaches--Jakob Nielsen-type asceticism and David Siegel "Killer Website"
> jury rigging. The former remains mired in a general suspicion of Dionysian
> terrorism (either the fear that someone, somewhere, might be having a good
> time or the somewhat more rational worry that party goers might leave the
> hotel room trashed.) The latter was undermined by advancing standards but
> not before many people developed the habit of relying on problematic
> alternatives, the site that started this conversation being an example.
>
> Print designers do have some problems fitting into web design. (For my take
> on that subject ten years ago, see
> http://www.gunnarswanson.com/writing/WebVsDesign.pdf) We tend to be
> control
> freaks in a medium that only allows control in odd ways. Designing for the
> web is, in many ways, like pushing a rope. (Some of the realizations of web
> design would serve us graphic designers well in other media, too.)
>
> The various attempts to make web design WYSIWYGish have ranged in quality
> of
> interface and quality of output. Part of this is because some technical
> choices are so fundamental to basic visual design decisions in a way that
> is
> much less common in print design. This makes print development application
> paradigms unsuitable to the task.
>
> I've long thought that this is a place for an AI-driven application for
> design. When someone sets a width, the software would ask "What do you want
> to have happen if someone opens her browser wider? Does the window stay the
> same size, remain proportional. . .?" Or when someone does something that
> relies on specific browsers, it could say "What do you want to do about the
> 39% of web users who will not be able to see this?" When someone sets
> links
> that are not described in text, it could say "Blind people will not be able
> to use your site because you didn't bother with tags. You client could be
> heading for a lawsuit (as well as, at very least, joining you for a long
> stay in purgatory.)" When someone makes forms that only work in Windows it
> could say "Warning: Your location has been sent to Gunnar Swanson. He is
> coming with six of his most thuggish friends and intends to do permanent
> physical harm to you."
>
> It is worth pointing out that websites promoting graphic design programs
> should, like any other piece of promotional design, reflect their subject
> matter and satisfy their audience. One thing that would be as pathetic as a
> design school website acting like it was designed by a graphic designer is
> one looking like it was not.
>
>
> Gunnar
> ----------
> Gunnar Swanson Design Office
> 1901 East 6th Street
> Greenville NC 27858
> USA
>
> [log in to unmask]
> +1 252 258 7006
>
> http://www.gunnarswanson.com
>
>
>
>
>
--
Ranjit Menon
TAIK Helsinki
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