27  Who cares if designers are bored?

We see web interface design fads over the years as designers supposedly vie to garner visitor attention, but is that really what they are doing?

In 1984, Colin Wheildon performed some research into the effects of different typographical elements for the Newspaper Advertising Bureau of Australia Ltd. That research was later transformed into a book called Type & Layout: Are You Communicating or Just Making Pretty Shapes. As the title implies, there seems to be a tradeoff going on in design between what helps communication and what is being done for visual appeasement.

Up until then, layout rules were a rather ad-hoc collection of rules-of-thumb, and this research provided some rationale for design decisions that seemed to work well, or not, especially in advertising. Many graphics designers spat the dummy as it challenged the efficacy of many design elements that were more distracting than communicative, or were not communicating what they were supposed to. It is always a problem for creative people when someone comes along with criteria that cramp their style.

But then, graphic designers are not employed to be artists in their own right, to do what they want according to their own criteria. They are there to design a visually appealing aesthetic that enables the communication of the message that the whole work is there for. Of course, graphics designers will want to alleviate boredom by coming up with novel presentations, but what they are working on is not so they can win awards or make their resumes look better.

Books have been around for centuries, and while rarer early on, gained huge traction with the invention of the printing press. Many manuscripts were embellished with coloured flourishes and images, but the limitations of presses meant those extras could not be done on them until the first colour presses in 1457 and engravings in 1465. However, plain-text single-colour printing is still the cheapest for mass-produced novels, and they are still popular, even in electronic form. The only place where designers have any input is on their covers.

With the web and plentiful drag-and-drop designer interfaces for producing pages, almost anyone can throw together pages. However, to make those pages have something worthwhile to say requires writers, and to make them look good requires graphics designers. Having writers who cannot write coherent copy, or designers who clutter up pages with too many clashing elements, makes for a failure to communicate. So what's required to make it all work?

Visuals, like images and video in later years, certainly can make pages more attractive, but do they really communicate the message of the page? We have seen many iconic images over the years, and they may remind us of key events, but only because we remember what was happening at the time. They would mean almost nothing to someone who does not know that context, and a different caption could make them seem to be about something much different from the original context.

Words are a shorthand for triggering our internal meanings, and so particular sequences of them can prompt us to think more deeply, or distract us from that introspection. While images may trigger a reaction, words can lead us to change our beliefs. It is said that a picture is worth a thousand words, but without anything else, which thousand words are triggered can vary wildly between people. The only way to help people focus on what images are meant to convey is to prompt them with words.

For example, during the attack on the Twin Towers in New York on 11 Sep 2001, a photo was taken of a person falling head-first from the upper floors of a tower. Just pondering on a person having to make a decision between being burnt alive or certain death from falling is horrific. However, if the caption to the picture said that the image was of a dummy being thrown off the building, a whole different and perhaps amusing set of thoughts is triggered. Here the context provided by a few words radically changes the perception of the image. The words have the power that the image reinforces.

It is the words that are the key communicator of the important messages on any page. That means that graphics designers are there to support the words by making sure they receive the focus. Indulging their efforts to make their designs more important will sabotage the message. Their job is to make sure the reader's visual focus proceeds through the required focal points on the page in the order required. That is the only purpose of the layout. A knowledge of typography is essential, especially as to what improves focus and communication, and what does not.

Web design is not for frustrated creative writers or designers unless it is their own site, and on those they can do whatever they like, but there are probably better mediums that can better show off their creativity. There are very few circumstances where people want to battle the design to get to what they want out of the site, so it is better we keep the layout and messages simple. The more complex the message or narrative, the more simple the design needs to be, otherwise visitors will go to a site that does not require them work so hard.

In industrial design, it is always better to keep layouts simple, with what is used most more obvious. Options need to be reduced and be unambiguous so that they are able to be selected from quickly, almost without thinking. Visual embellishments need to be used only if they facilitate focusing on a particular element, and certainly not for multiple elements that must be selected between. Related elements need to be closer together, with more space between those groups.

A reader's eye will follow their usual reading direction, so unless there is an element in the upper starting side of a page, their eye must be coaxed to the wanted focus. That may mean having intermediate but lesser elements, or having a gradient that fades into the wanted element. Too many elements will only create confusion as to what the real focus is to be. While artworks may use complex visual weighting to draw the viewer into the experience of the work, for websites, it is about keeping a flow that guides the viewer sequentially though the layout to what they must interact with.

In this way, web design is utilitarian, whereas artistic design is experiential. Therefore, web design is about getting a person to where they want to go as quickly as possible. Artistic design is about facilitating the viewer to dwell within the canvas at length. These are two radically different goals and confusing them will prevent either working as intended. That means keeping graphic design on a tight leash, even if designers feel bored!

Searching for web design trends on YouTube will bring up a lot of graphics designers extolling the virtues of many busy and obscuring designs that are supposed to be of benefit for websites but would actually make them less fit for purpose. These are like getting a producer to make a recording to highlight an artist's vocals, but the voice is buried in effects and so subservient to the whole track that it has become just another addition to their portfolio that they sucked someone else into paying for.

Before taking on a graphics designer, check out if the samples in their portfolio are actually useful as navigation pages or clearly appropriate for the type of content the site is to hold. Check if their complete website designs retain continuity of design across pages and clearly enable seeing that they do indeed belong to the one site, rather than being a bunch of individual artworks that do not aesthetically relate to each other. Visitors need to remember the name and branding of the site rather than whether it looked good or was entertaining.

Importantly, when examining the portfolio sites of a graphic designer, check that they actually worked on all their pages. Unfortunately, a lot of design work is focused upon the home page, which is usually just a fancy navigation page. Have they built pages for policies, contacts, and articles with more structure than just pictures with sporadic text in between? Do their sites have a structure that is suited to a body of knowledge rather than just a bunch of fancy pages? Do they really show that they understand how important the written word is as the core communicator of meaning?