MikePadgett.com

In this item, I will refer to “editorial design” as the refinement and optimisation content presentation for content-driven websites.

Of course, editorial design for print predates the Internet and web designers may even take some cues from it, but this item is concerned only with the digital domain.

Article continues after the jump…

I have arrived at a logical pause in my efforts to write an Information Design library, so in the current fashion I’m releasing it as a “beta”.

Some time ago, I wrote in a post entitled “21st Century Job” that an Information Designer …

“…makes sense of complex information and communicates it … so that information is converted to knowledge.”

Now since I’ve been a consultant in this capacity for some time, I’ve learned a couple of things that have prompted these recent efforts:

1. Clients need to have a better understanding of Information Design
2. The concepts and processes I use need to be documented

The library (working title “Insight”) attempts to address both these issues by describing the conceptual framework of Information Design. So far, I have only just begun to discuss the design disciplines involved, starting with web-based design, the area in which I’m most active.

So rather than bang on about how I’m trying to write more nowadays anyway (future career move in the offing?), I’ll just close there.

By way of a postscript, I might add that “writing the library has been a labour of love”, but there are problems with that soundbite:

1. I make it sound like I’ve finished writing it, which I haven’t;
2. I didn’t love the writing, it was a bit of a grind, but I hope reading it won’t be!

If you didn’t already spot the link above, you can find the library at: http://www.fincaso.com/work/insight. Enjoy!

Remember when a job was something to be proud of? When a job was a job for life?

Before you complain and click “Back” dear reader, let me assure you that this is not an article about the long-term effects of Thatcherism.

No Sir/Madam, this is an article about breaking free from the strictures of bad jobs and worse job titles and proposing a new role for the 21st century. It’ll come as no surprise to you that I’m trying to occupy this role myself.

I’ll call the role Information Designer. This isn’t a new job title - it already means something in Designland, but that definition isn’t nearly enough. It’s also a very basic job title, because the job should come with a wide brief and enough autonomy for the individual to firm up that brief. Indeed, Information Design already exists as a body of disciplines, but the job specs are always highly fragmented.

The Information Designer that I envisage is someone who, in the simplest terms, makes sense of complex information and communicates it effectively so that information is converted to knowledge.

The work includes elements of:

• Business intelligence
• Data analysis
• Web design (plus usability and accessibility)
• Graphic design (plus typography)
• Training and presentation delivery
• [Insert relevant disciplines here]

There are quite a few skillsets here, including those of web designer, graphic designer and information architect. I think that, just as web people need to have a good grasp of several technologies, so too should the 21st century Information Designer be very capable in each of these disciplines, rather than having to outsource bits of it to freelancers.

The 21st century Information Designer role has precedents. While designers could still avoid being pigeonholed, the range of Otl Aicher’s work comes close to my concept, as does the utility of Harry Beck’s solution to the mapping of the London Underground in 1931.

The Information Designer is a designer since his/her work is all about finding solutions, but the information could be absolutely anything considered complex needing logical organisation and it’s this latter aspect that goes beyond visual design.

I stumbled across Microsoft Expression this afternoon, quite by chance, really. Expression is a three-product graphics suite for designers. It borrows enormously from Macromedia Studio and a bit of Adobe Photoshop.

It seems to me to be quite a bald response to Macromedia’s buyout, but as usual Microsoft has an angle.

That angle is XAML, the UI language based on the XML standard that Microsoft will ship with Avalon.

XAML, which from what I’ve seen bears comparison to XML-based code for Macromedia Flex applications, is the output format from Expression’s Interactive Designer, the more unusual package in the suite.

Also on offer are Graphic Designer and Web Designer, sold to us via the kind of (literally) kaleidoscopic visuals that presumably appeal to funky design types.

Sample downloads weigh in at upto a rather hefty 140Mb.

Can’t wait to hear the price!

Scott Jason Cohen complains of the web: “the whole enterprise is about structure” in his recent article at A List Apart.

Cohen is a web designer who probably would not have agreed with my earlier item on Graphic Designers. He tells us that information architects did a lot of the design at one of his previous jobs, such that little was left to the imagination. “The designers - the ones who went to school for years, studying layout, color, and the effective way to deliver a message in any medium – were now glorified painters”, he says.

It’s an interesting article, coloured by a kind of short-term nostalgia for a time when the web designer did everything, from design to front-end build.

Only a few years on, we no longer live in that world. The Internet is big business, and big business hates unquantifiable risk. Hence the information architects.

Where I work today, there’s not a great deal of creativity in the job. This month’s measure of creativity has been designing a Christmas header for the Intranet, because everything under the header is a business process or an application. Not for nothing am I vastly outnumbered by developers in my department.

So what are Cohen and so many others missing? I think it might be the soul of design. As he suggests: “Every designer I know is an artist. They paint, they play music, they DJ, they sculpt.” True, because these people are looking for the soul of life. Web design is fast running out of soul, because somebody has got to pay and the site has to make a profit. If you could see my annual objectives, my key deliverables and my profit contribution, you would be forced to agree.

A few years ago, I would have raged about this. I bounced anything that did not offer me a blank canvas, an open brief. That’s perhaps a naive attitude to have, but then I didn’t “go to school for years”, so I didn’t realise at first that good clients never let you run amok with their brand.

Now, I have a different kind of idealism. In place of creative experiment, increasingly I am helping people to do their job. I try to work for the user whilst developers seem to work for themselves. Along the way, I innovate, but those innovations are normally about simplifying the enormous complexity of user experiences created during an immature boom in web-delivered business.

It’s up to web designers to find something in their work. I’m certainly not as zealous about web design as design now, but usability is a new and, for the time being at least, engaging part of the job.

This item is a follow-on really from a statement I made in my previous article about User Experience 2005: how we are web designers rather than artists.

J recently pointed out to me a website she’s been looking at called Heavy Backpack. It’s billed by its makers as a “Creative Catalogue” - in other words a mini portfolio for each of its contributors and there are some outstanding examples of graphic design in there with the usual derivative stuff.

Heavy Backpack

But the site itself is what interested me first. It looks attractive, along similar lines as K10K or any number of those horrible awards sites that all present us with a cutting edge mostly made out of Flash.

Now, of course I realise that the right way to do this kind of magazine (or catalogue or whatever) site is to mute your design so as to let the content do the talking, but being a person interested in the details, I couldn’t help but notice as the site slowly loaded that there were so many images on the page.

My interest was piqued and I dived right into the source code to see what efforts had been made.

Few. 27 validation errors in HTML 4.01 Loose. A cherry pick of the accessibility issues includes those perennial favourites tiny type, iframes and almost no alt attributes.

The team that put Heavy Backpack together is Wade Studios, an Australian business with a good client list. Very talented graphic designers, clearly, but as web designers they ain’t.

In the last year, I have become increasingly convinced that to call yourself a web designer today means that you are a proficient XHTML/CSS coder, a standards evangelist and well-versed in usability and accessibility best practices. So says Zeldman, so says O’Shea and all that lot, so says Nielsen, and so say I. A graphic designer is not a web designer.

Quote:

“Too many graphic designers have tried to force the Web to be what it is not, in the process creating ineffective and sometimes unusable websites. Quality web design is driven by information architecture design principles. Graphic design should support these principles.” - Gerry McGovern

Graphic design houses ignored the Internet. It was low culture for a long time and there was no money in it. But today, interactive projects can rival those in other media in scale and value and now these same graphic design houses are selling their web capabilities where they can’t get through the door on the back of print alone.

But in truth, the fuddy old Art Directors don’t understand websites. Just as some design houses tried to stay aloof when DTP was adopted by all walks of employee (even though the product was crap, it was certainly cheap) they also missed the boat with the Internet.

Hence why the code is neanderthal, or worse, art program-generated.

Hence also why it’s pretty but without practicality.

[See also: Design Choices Can Cripple A Website by Nick Usborne, 08/11/2005 A List Apart]