The Arts & Crafts of Web Design – or What Would William Do?
An Event Apart 2008, Day 2, 3:45pm – 4:45pm
Read the previous talk in this series, The In-House Designer by Cameron Moll, or view An Event Apart’s Table of Contents
The Arts & Crafts of Web Design – or What Would William Do?
- It’s all about being like this William Morris dude, his ethic.
- Via Cameron Moll, http://tinyurl.com/6x4lg
- This William dude’s thing was:
- Stay true to Nature and Materials
- What are the material properties of a pixel?
- We’re dealing with light: light coming off of a screen.
- Also dealing with code, but mainly, staying true to a pixel.
- Need not simulate a physical material
- Typography is our material:
- push css-typography (like coudal.com )
- Coudal is using letter-spacing to change the kerning of these letters.
- http://poccuo.com/ If you learn one thing from this: Georgia, 40px. That’s all. Beautiful.
- oversized text = easy to use (vimeo vs. youtube, roov, twitter, 37 signals)
- Vimeo: It’s like it says, our service will be easy to use, see how easy it is to read this text!
- ROOV: Just use that space on the text, don’t fill it with a bunch of stuff
- 37Signals: “Work well”. It shows it is easy to use, gives you that feeling, so warm and fuzzy.
- Behaviour as material: It should look like it does what it does. When Ajax first came out, it was like “What! No. There needs to be a refresh.” So there needs to be a transitional animation so that it looks like it’s doing what it’s doing. Even though you don’t need to, just give the feeling, it’s our material.
- Unite art (design) and hand craft
- When is “genius design” more appropriate than “user-centered” design? When contemporary visual culture becomes corrupted. When forging a new medium. Read: iPod is genius design.
- Unite the microcosmic and macrocosmic
- He started to get really interested in typography
- Started on the paper, the form of the type, etc, and went out wider until lastly, the printed matter on the page
- Showing detail on buildings
- If it doesn’t need to be scalable, don’t automate it, make each section slightly different.
- value utility. value beauty.
- Beauty alone is a legitimate reason for something to exist.
- Now that everyone can make a cookie-cutter site for free, beauty and customization is more important than ever.
- This is not about taking over the page with ornamentation, but using it for flourish and make it beautiful. Great designers did these ornamental things for a long time, “until these Swiss designers came in and then everything went all” wonky.
- Enjoy work.
- Everyone is here because we enjoy what we’re doing and it makes us excited.
- So, ensure that what we’re doing is something that is pleasing to us.
- If you’re not excited, get excited by delving deeper, or maybe go into something else.
- Orchestrate things so that you do what you like (like what Cameron’s talk was on).
- Redesign the whole world
- “My hope is to get mumbo jumbo out of the world.” – William Morris, on his deathbed. (As in, to eliminate it)
- Designers make the world. Design the context around your design.
View the next talk in this series: Designing the Next Generation of Web Apps by Jeff Veen, or skip to An Event Apart’s Table of Contents
