Three wolvesâ„¢

A very interesting article on canonical web designs over at bokardo.com

Here’s just a few of the juicy, thought inducing quotes from the article:

So, as a web designer, there is no analog to “look at this logo and see how it stands for a company�. That’s relatively easy for graphic designers because we can quickly appreciate the way a logo graphically depicts some attribute of the company: “solid, blue, Big Blue, trustworthy�. Even if we don’t like the company or if its never done anything good for us, we can make this judgment of the design of the logo.

But in web design, we can’t pass such sophisticated judgment on a design without having an actual experience with the web application itself. Without actually experiencing the value first-hand, we can’t look at a web site and say “hey, that web site is well designed because it represents the company well�. This is the primary disconnect when talking about judging great web design. You’ve got to experience it in a real way to know if it is great.

Graphic designers can judge by looking. Web designers cannot. Web designers must judge by doing (or observing others doing). The problem is that too many people judge web designs without actually using them. Instead, they look. When you use the shortcut of looking, you tend to judge what you’re looking at: the visuals. But when you use something, your relationship to that thing necessarily changes.

In addition, in web design there is no single design element like a logo we can point to in praise. You never see a product review standing by itself like you do the IBM logo. Web design needs the context of the site to make sense. A logo does not.

The lore of web design is different than the lore of printed design. Print design produces artifacts that do not change. Web design produces applications that do.

I think i’m somewhat guilty of this to an extent: judging good web design by how it looks (either my own, or some web designer I respect). And our clients are too. We present them visuals to essentially get their buy-in. We rationalize our process to them and they either love it or they have changes or they hate it. The usual deal. But they’re evaluating our design based on a static visual.

We just completed a project recently for a large government organisation, and at times they were a little cagey about the design up until it actually got built, at which point they “got it”. They loved it. They could literally see the rationale behind the look and feel because they were using the site to actually do stuff.

So, to make my point here, I think the guys at 37 signals (who I recently heard speak at the FOWD conference) really do have a point when they talk about starting with HTML as the design genesis rather than Photoshop visuals (goes off to find suitable links to appropriate articles). I also have some reservations about that process too (works well for app design, not so well for content/marketing driven sites), but ultimately good web design can’t be judged on looks alone. Very early on in the web design process we need to be illustrating to the client how a particular design ‘works’ on the web. How we do that in a time and budget conscious manner i’m still not sure on, but I am sure that it would help sell in our designs when clients can actually see a working version early on in the project.