Smashing the Template

Which is more important to you as a designer: aesthetics or usability?

Aesthetics, hands down. I’m not saying aesthetics are more important than usability in general, but personally, my interests lie more in aesthetics. That’s why I’m in this business, and that’s certainly why people employ me—for my aesthetics.

Can you elaborate on this a bit?

I think it just comes down to the simple fact that safe, non-experimental design bores me, and I get sick of seeing it absolutely everywhere. I don’t think I’m that experimental, really, but it’s obvious the vast majority of designers are afraid to step outside current design trends.

You’ve spoken in the past about using narrative cues to create direction and resolution in visual design. What does that narrative focus add to a visual design for, say, a website?

Well, in applying narrative theory to web design, I was trying to look at how experimental design creates a sense of tension—a pleasing level of tension akin to the one experienced as a narrative builds to a climax—and how, if it’s wrapped up in an aesthetically pleasing design, we can reach a happy conclusion, with the status quo changed for the better.

So my application of narrative theory to web design is more about the way in which we experience design, rather than a model that says we should design in a narrative way.

Can you give some examples of how this theory plays out in a practical sense? Why would you say most design on the web is less narrative than a medium like print?

It’d be nice to see more art direction online, and see sites breaking free from the rigidity of templates. Think of the impact of a featured article in print and then its tame representation online; it’s just not comparable.

I think a lot of it comes down to the lack of art direction in web design, especially when compared with a site’s counterpart in print. Jason Santa Maria’s site is an example that’s often cited to demonstrate how this could be changed: every post looks different.

So you think print still has a future in the annals of design?

Although the web is a continuation and expansion of print design, it’s still very different. It’s not just the way we design for each—it’s about the experience.

The way you experience a printed newspaper or magazine is totally different from the way you experience their counterparts on the web. Because of that, print will always have a place.

But what about new media technologies like blogs that are having such a big impact on traditional print publishing?

I think blogs have had—or are currently having—a huge effect on traditional idea of what journalism actually is. In the nineties, when everyone had personal home pages, they were just sites. But because blogs are instantly so comparable to offline newspapers and magazines, we’ve seen a bigger shift towards citizen journalism.

On the one hand, this is great since it removes a lot of the elitism present in traditional journalism. But the flip side is that, perhaps that was there for a reason!

So, while it’s great that everyone can be a journalist, we should bear in mind that most people are not journalists by trade for a reason. Unfortunately, the quality of writing on the web is still largely inferior to that in traditional publications.

What about aggregators, which compile content from multiple professional sources?

Aggregators are changing the way in which we experience news, because the source is becoming decentralized. Potentially, this is a great thing, since the focus is then on the content and not on the source. Aggregators, by their very nature, pull from a variety of sources, and therefore we should—in theory—be heading towards a more objective system.

Hand-in-hand with your advocacy of narrative design is your argument that designers can affect the habits of their audience by intentionally degrading the experience in one medium versus another (for example, enabling certain features in Firefox but disabling them in Internet Explorer). How can designers use this “intentional degradation” to affect how people interact with design?

Intentional degradation—and, by implication, progressive enhancement [rewarding good habits with more complete design or enhanced features]—has to be considered within the context of the website, or more specifically, according to the target audience.

Put simply, you can’t let the site look bad in Internet Explorer if that browser is used by the majority of your readers.

But even so, we shouldn’t get too caught up about getting websites to look the same in every browser. Even if an IE version does degrade to something less pretty than what Safari users will see, that doesn’t necessarily matter—as long as the IE version doesn’t appear to be broken.

So you think that advocating for preferred browsers is the way to go?

I’m not advocating that we only support new browsers and drop off support for older browsers as soon as possible. Just that we remain aware of the inevitable difference between browsers, and that we design according to our target audience.

What got you talking about your theories of web design?

I used to build Flash-only websites and it was fine, but I started to get frustrated by the amount of complex code I had to write to achieve relatively simple results, and the Flash IDE [integrated development environment, or the software used to design in the Flash medium] is a real pain.

There’s something more tangible about HTML [The simple markup language that defines most websites’ structure and textual content]. And I like the idea of it being accessible to everyone, in spite of the inconsistencies across browsers.

Who or what are some of your most important design influences?

I think Dave McKean had a big influence on me as a young designer and artist. I still love his work, especially his early covers for The Sandman [the graphic novel series by Neil Gaiman] in his pre-Photoshop days.

In general, I’m a fan of anyone who sets trends instead of following them, and who embraces the idea of making the web look beautiful.

Who do you think we should be watching to bring design on the web to the next level?

Khoi Vinh, for his work at The New York Times. Jason Santa Maria, for the art direction stuff that I mentioned earlier. John Gruber, for the fact that he manages to charge a subscription fee for an enhanced version of his RSS feed [laughs].

Quick—the homepage of nytimes.com: messy or brilliant?

Why can’t messy also be brilliant? ♦