My spouse and I have a regular, ongoing argument about design. Usually it’s a form vs function argument, which I find stupid. As the logical, left-brained engineer, he is forever saying, “I don’t care how it LOOKS, I care how it PERFORMS.” And very often this leads him to believe that anything with decent form automatically lacks function.
As a designer, I strongly disagree. Good design *is* function. (Design of Everyday Things, anyone?) If you take function out of the equation, or treat it as a tacked-on option (“You want fries with that?”), you have poor design.
Jeff Fisher (@LogoMotives) tweeted a piece from the Washington Post headlined "Study: Good design causes the brain to pay more attention to news stories.” Well, of course. The paper teamed up with the MediaBrain Lab at the Missouri School of Journalism and shockingly found that a cleaner design made stories easier to read, more enjoyable, and more interesting to the reader.
Duh.
Clear the crap out of the way, and the reader will engage with the easy path you have created. (Their example of a cluttered page, unsurprisingly, was filled with clickbait advertising.)
A few years ago I did the page layout for a book my aunt wrote, and of course this almost got into a familial version of “design by committee.” After a lot of back and forth with several family members, I told them that I didn’t want them to “like” my work. “It should be invisible.”
Designers know this argument...the design should be so smooth and intuitive that you don’t even notice it, it just simply belongs. I read once (and so help me, I can’t find it again) that on the first review of the Star Wars movie sound effects, no one really noticed the sound effect the engineers had chosen for the lightsaber...and that’s the sort of reaction you want, is no reaction. It fits so well that your audience simply accepts it.
That’s what I was aiming for with the book layout. I didn’t want anyone to fawn over the type that was used, or how much white space was incorporated. I just wanted it to look clean, clear, and inviting. Invisible.
My spouse doesn’t really see it that way…to him, the functionality is the only thing that he can see. So a clunky interface means nothing to him. This would help explain the hideous plastic “lunchroom” table in my living room for the last several years. It’s a foldable, white, plastic table with black metal legs, and it currently mocks me from its nest alongside the stairwell. My kids are competitive Pokemon card players, so the number of cards we have is beyond ridiculous. In the tens of thousands. And in order to sort them (for storage, for selling), you have to have vast tracts of land amounts of horizontal space. Enter the table, a late-night big-box-store purchase which made me squawk a good deal, and I was assured that “It’ll only be up for a week or two every few months, I’ll take it down when I’m done.” It used to block my bookshelves for months at a time, so now I have to be grateful that it changed location next to the stairwell. Of course, it blocks access to the desk in the living room, and has been sitting there for well over a year. Or two. Possibly three. It also encourages more clutter to exist, and the thing is the very definition of Bad Design. Oh, the table is functional, alright, but the system built around the stupid table? Awful. It’s like having a DB-IV interface on my Mac. So bad you nearly trip on it.
On the other hand, I was absolutely struck the other day by the layout given to a New York Times article, Greenland Is Melting Away. I was mesmerized by bits of it. I called my spouse over.
"This is how my newspaper should look!" I exclaimed. "This is how my textbooks should look!"
I was a newspaper reporter back in the day...and what with my kids, I've gotten rather deeply into education as well. Go see this thing on a bigger screen if you can, it's pretty fantastic. THIS is what we have the capacity to do now...pardon my French, but why in the hell are we still pissing around with animated "page turns" in digital newspapers?? Get out of the old paradigm, guys, seriously! You have literal magic at your fingertips. Use it! (Come on, how close is this to an issue of the Daily Prophet? You Potter fans hear me, I know you do.)
