Pretty Persuasion
I’ve been reading this post on graphpaper about the current perception of graphic design for the Web. The inspiration for this post was a recent essay by Armin Vit conveying his thoughts on the lack of “canonical” web designs. Vit wonders aloud why there are no web designs that are considered “landmarks” in the industry, just as there are milestone examples of design in other disciplines:
Milton Glaser’s Dylan poster. Paul Rand’s IBM logo. Paula Scher’s Public Theater posters. Massimo Vignelli’s New York subway map. Kyle Cooper’s Seven opening titles. These are only a few landmark projects of our profession. … Myself, I could list projects in every category from logos, to annual reports, to magazine covers, to packaging, to typefaces, to opening titles that could be considered landmark projects… But when it comes to web sites, I can’t think of a single www that could be comparable — in gravitas, praise, or memorability — as any of the few projects I just mentioned.
Vit then goes on to mention Google, praising the application’s functionality while describing its logo as “aesthetically anything but pleasing.” And maybe he has a point there, if you’re simply examining the color and typography. Josh Bokardo, however, takes exception to employing an evaluative approach limited to mere topical inspection:
(F)rankly, I think Armin has missed his own point. He wants to know what web designers see as canonical, but he’s dismissing the obvious answer because it doesn’t fit into his canonical mold of graphic design. In other words, he’s looking at Google from a graphic design perspective, when web designers necessarily have to look at it from an interaction design perspective. …
Google has, for nearly ten years, provided the best search engine on the Web. It is the standard by which all other search engines are compared. In the exact same way that Massimo Vignelli’s New York subway map has affected the design of subway maps since, Google has affected the design of search engines. I know design teams that have copied the search results pages of Google almost exactly simply because it was the design that Google used.
Back to graphpaper, where Christopher Fahey nicely summarizes the debate and wonders if the issue is simply a matter of semantics:
Perhaps Armin brought it on himself by using the phrase “web design” when it seems he really means “graphic design on the web”. … Armin is not talking about functionality, and that’s okay! He is talking about the color, typography, shape, layout and all the other formal elements that make up a site’s graphic design. Hell, Armin would probably be quite happy to see just one truly great logo for a web-based product, a logo whose design has the same timeless gravity as the logos from the history of graphic design.
So you want to know what I think. Well, if I had to choose between Vit and Bokardo, I’d go with Josh. I see visual appeal as just one component of the holistic interaction design experience, certainly a very important one, and thus tightly coupled with a product’s functionality. Doesn’t mean I don’t value the creative discipline, or that I don’t agree with Fahey’s defense of graphic design for the Web. His post and the subsequent discussion thread are largely spot-on.
Where I sort of disagree with Fahey is when he states that “claims (that) Google’s iconic stroke of genius lies in its functionality … (are) the equivalent of claiming that Milton Glaser’s Dylan poster’s ‘design’ includes Bob Dylan’s lyrics (and that) Vignelli’s subway map ‘design’ includes the engineering of the trains and tunnels of the NYC transit system.” In those cases, graphic design serves as a descriptor of the product or service; Dylan’s music and lyrics, in a sense, are an intended functionality the design is meant to promote. For websites and applications, however, the design is the functionality — the result of a symbiotic process involving multiple disciplines.
Look, I love beautiful websites and agree that Google’s logo is a primary-colored joke. I even sort of agree that there aren’t really any “landmark” examples of web graphic design. I’m just saying that the art of designing and developing attractive, utile experiences requires cross-functional disciplines all working in sync, and that the ensuing artifacts should be evaluated as the result of that process.