Here’s a great slideshow illustrating the difference between graphic design and interaction design. With this blog, one of my goals is to articulate and refine my definitions of design, the sub-disciplines of design, and how other disciples (like art, science, politics, philosophy, and literature) relate to design. I think presentations like this will help me formulate these definitions.
[ Found via Monoscope ]
2 responses so far ↓
Warren // September 18, 2008 at 10:32 pm |
The section of that slideshow which discussed ways design tried to dictate user needs brings back some not-terribly-fond memories.
I worked in interactive software for more than a decade, doing both desktop and web apps. While in a desktop environment I didn’t have many qualms about filling the monitor with a splash screen, since strictly speaking the software, on being double-clicked, was effectively being given permission to do whatever it needed to.
However it was — and to my mind still is — very different online. Tying output to a browser is not simply a bad design choice; it’s very poor engineering to produce code so fragile it can’t work outside a very restricted set of limitations. Text-as-graphic makes sense, but only for significant things like subject headers, never for body; and only with alt tags to allow navigation by the blind.
And I strenuously fought against any suggestion of resizing browser windows; I fell back on popups instead with the chrome stripped off, and for good reason.
As a user, when I go to a web site, I am no by any means giving it permission to do whatever it feels like with my machine. I don’t want my browser windows moved or scaled. That’s annoying enough; however there are other concerns. Special-needs users could end up losing significant controls by a browser being hijacked by a site, for whatever purpose.
The user’s system, I always held, is sacrosanct. If a program changes settings on launch, it should restore them on exit. Web sites absolutely fall under this restriction too. Between sites that scale, and sites that decide to load music or animation on page load whether I want it or not, there are some domains I simply will not visit any more.
I like this blog. Looking forward to more.
tampaseo // September 19, 2008 at 3:35 pm |
wow – really great slideshow presentation and topic. Not much to add that Warren didn’t hit on-
Fortunately, the new round of browsers is supporting ZOOM instead of simple text resizing, preventing most sites from turning into a mangled mess when resized..
being in a webdev environment myself, I think that custom style sheets for different user behaviors or browsers, etc… is a great way to try and maintain SOME control of design in a site.
unfortunately, this usually adds a decent amount of extra development time to any given project – and time is money.
I think the grid-based frameworks and some of the css frameworks from google and yahoo are a good start, but I’m of the opinion that people who make crap stuff will make crap stuff no matter what frameworks you give them to work in. blinking and scrolling text, anyone?