We Design……Remember That
Before you add that pretty little flower at the top of your page, take a minute to think, why that is going there? Did you ever stop to think why you are adding certain aesthetics to your page? Well start thinking about it, because more often than not, as I’ve noticed in young designers and in my past designs also, it does not need to go there. You are not supposed to be designing for the sake of design. You should be designing in order to create a solution for a problem. And we often forget that.
One definition that came up when searching for the meaning of design was: “to devise for a specific function or end, or to have as a purpose.” Looking back on when I first started designing for the web, I realize that I made a mistake that maybe other designers might have made at one point or another. I did not think about what design actually meant. Sites that I first started building were not approached from a solution stand point. My only concern was to make them look pretty. I was more worried about which decorations to put up than how the site would function.
I was wrong.
I accept the fact that I was so naive in jumping into the design that I didn’t care to pay attention to some of the key fundamentals of design. Over the past few months, I have been trying very hard to change the way that I approach design by making sure that sites that I work on now solve problems. I make sure that they accomplish a goal, because otherwise, it is just art. Art is the “human effort to imitate, supplement, alter, or counteract the work of nature.” Does this sound like something that us web designers do? I don’t think so either.
That does not mean that a design can’t look good–in fact, the visual communication aspect of design is what makes good sites function the way they do. And at times, that would require a certain aesthetic, like a drop shadow, or thick border. You should be able to explain why you added certain design features to a site, because if you can’t explain it, then maybe it should not be there. That is the difference between art, and design. Art does not give you a solution to a problem, design does.
Design is power, and to be able to control how users navigate a page, or where their eyes will look first in an effective manner separates the good designers from the bad. What made me question the number of good designers from the bad was a recent discussion about the Craigslist makeover done at SXSW as a design exercise by a panel of professional designers. A discussion about this redesign happened on Digg, and I must say that this might have been one of the most frustrating discussions I’ve read. Now, Craiglist’s current site isn’t the prettiest site I’ve ever seen, but it works. It functions exactly how it should with that amount of information.
The comments that people left on Digg, about the design, were more bad than good, in saying things along the line of new the design needing more graphics, or that the new design was not easier to use. It made me wonder where some of these people learned about design from, to feel the need to question a panel of professional designers. In my opinion, the redesign is stunning, to point where I felt it was only necessary to use the Greasemonkey script so that my Craigslist always looks like that!
Design must accomplish something. If it is not meant to address some general or specific issue, it is just art or decoration. Something that I would recommend to all young designers, such as myself, it to re-evaluate the way we approach designing. We need to not over-saturate our designs with decorations for the sake of making it look pretty. We need to keep what it means to be a designer. We problem solve. We design solutions through visual communication creating functionality, and usability. So before you go crazy with the decorations, just remember, that it’s not about what decoration you want to spruce up a page, it’s about what the users need for a good and meaningful experience.