Ugly design and good communication
Another thing that’s hard to fit into a journalism curriculum is graphic design. Often we have design wedged into the editing class, and the person teaching the class is someone who’s far, far more experienced with the AP Stylebook than with use of color and typography.
This post by a semi-anonymous Web designer provides a condensed introduction to many of the debates and truisms about designing for online media (found by way of Digg). He provides some excellent links in his post, so take a look.
First, the tension between designers and usability experts centers on this:
Designers have too much emotional bias towards pretty things.
Can a site be both pretty AND usable? It may depend on your idea of what’s “pretty.” I have had students who think some outrageous color combinations are pretty, when in fact they make the Web page impossible to look at for more than 2 seconds!
Second, usability sometimes requires the addition of elements that would be considered “visual clutter” in print design — such as underlining links, which some Web designers consider quite ugly, so they leave the underline off.
Is this a choice fueled by a desire for being pretty or being usable? Given that the eye of a web user finds underlined links more easily, I’d wager it’s the former.
Third, and best of all, the blogger concludes that what works well in one medium often does not work well at all in another medium.
For beginning Web design students — even those who do have some graphic design skills already — that’s probably the most important lesson to learn.
Technorati tags: design | usability | online media
I was taught graphic design was about communication, not pretty. Pretty might be what’s required, but often it’s not.
April 28, 2006 at 4:12 pm