Selfish design
Originally published on November 14th, 2011
Its difficult when clients get so into a project that they can’t get past the design of it in order to understand that it won’t translate to a completely different site with different requirements.
Its especially hard for me, because I fight the urge to ‘take’ from other designs, and struggle to come up with something completely original. If I can’t do this, I don’t feel that I’ve truly done my job.
It is easy to ‘port’ over a design, and in a lot of cases, people will be happy with it. Some even win awards even though they are unoriginal. However, what are designers really doing when they ‘copy’ trends? They’re doing it for themselves.
A lot of emphasis has been put on the ‘experience’. Words like ‘magical’ are synonymous with award-winning design. But its disingenuous to think that they are real solutions. The reality is that they can be self-serving to the point that they’re completely unusable. Design transforms into art. Art becomes the experience.
There’s a lot of emotion, some would call magic, found in art. However, art, good art, is subjective. Movies provide great experiences to some, but are just as likely to be a horrible waste of time to others. There’s no denying that art can be very ‘magical’. It doesn’t make it universally acceptable or understood. A great design experience should strive to be universally acceptable and useable to its target audience.
Its increasingly becoming a trend to designing sites to impress rather than to be useable. One example would be ‘parallax’ scrolling. It works great for some sites which integrate it into their message, but as a design mechanic on its own, it is an extreme example of bad, chaotic design with no thought behind it. Simply put, in most cases, they’re terribly ‘one visit’ sites which provide an awful and embarrassing user experience.
A website is not a movie and its not a work of art (unless it is). In most cases, its a way to communicate with the user, and to provide them with relevant information in a timely manner. Designing a website otherwise is a selfish act of masturbation.
