The web design industry has only recently afforded content its rightful status. We were wrong to relegate content to the role of a commodity – something we could pour into beautifully-crafted templates. In our rush to rectify this balance, we mustn’t overcorrect and deprecate the role of truly creative design.

From an algorithmic perspective, the idea that style and substance are separate is appealing. It allows us to code markup and stylesheets independently, and fits the logical mindset shared by so many techies. But it’s a falsehood. Style and substance are irretrievably linked. Like space and time, they are neither separable nor the same thing – there exists no hierarchy between them, no primacy. One informs the other. The other informs the one.

It’s impossible to perceive content and presentation separately. The two combine to create something more valuable: meaning.

The same content, with very different meanings.

Some of the best-known examples of the content out design principle are blogs from today’s leading digital lights. These sites feature expert typography, harmony and balance. They are undoubtedly beautiful. They also look terribly similar. Book design is the dominant aesthetic, meaning that the content does indeed shine. However, individuality surfaces only in esoteric flourishes. The people who have made these sites are diverse and bold, but these qualities often struggle to surface.

It’s a mistake to let content drive design, just as it was to let design drive content. We mustn’t let the pendulum swing too far. If we are to go beyond mere information and style to create meaning, the two must be partners, feeding from and influencing each other.

Until we see more diversity in the sites that espouse a content out approach, I worry the movement could be too simply characterised as one of minimalism – or worse, faddishness and elitism:

The idea that content can act as the interface is noble. But sometimes you need interface. The interactivity and responsiveness of the digital medium means it excels at interface. Text can often suffice, but it possesses limited affordances. It conveys information and gives instructions well, but it’s poor at conferring mental models, creating subconscious emotions, establishing genre, and suggesting interaction capabilities: things crucial for brand-driven sites or functional applications.

Overly-literal interpretation of content out could create a web of homogeneity. A web that conveys little that a book could not, save for hyperlinks and videos. A web that fails to take full advantage of the digital medium. For all our talk of breaking free of the print design mentality, content out risks reducing the capabilities of the digital medium, in favour of fetishising the craft of print design. That would truly undermine the intent of the approach.

On the surface, tools like Instapaper, Safari Reader and the updated Readability are simply the logical continuation of the separation of presentation from content. However, I see them as embryonic oracles of the era of content shifting, in which users will push text, photos and videos between devices and contexts far removed from their current habitats. There will be substantial implications for publishing, information architecture, advertising, and design, which I’ll discuss in a future article. But for now, let’s look at the applications themselves:

Instapaper has become an essential part of my digital life, and I’m intrigued by the promise of Readability, above. However, I do feel the current crop of reading applications take too technical an approach to the art of reading. So much of our digital lives is spent pushing undone tasks from one service to another: emails to Things, RSS to a sprawling folder of “Unsorted bookmarks”. You’d be forgiven for thinking that the modern digital native is mostly concerned with reducing big numbers to zero.

So I’ve been thinking about how reading apps could take a different tack. How they could be calmer. How they could leave the to-read pressure behind and restore some enjoyment to reading. As a thought experiment, I’ve been sketching some thoughts on a hypothetical reading app: let’s call it CalmReader.

The primary design principle of CalmReader is that users should feel empowered to go with the flow, not to fight the tide. Don’t try to read everything, but do read something. CalmReader should be seen as a scrapbook, not a to-do list. Users should be encouraged to add as many articles as they like without fear of guilt at not reading them; with a Readability or Flattr-esque micropayment mechanism underlying the app, this is obviously good news for publishers.

CalmReader has no unread count. Unread counts suck the joy out of life, and the trivial pride of reaching zero is quickly crushed by inevitable new tasks. Unread counts are tolerable within to task-orientated environments like email, but within a reading application they reinforce the undesirable mentality of Keeping On Top Of Stuff, rather than enjoyment.

An estimated reading time accompanies each article, calculated from its word count. It’s harder to estimate the scale of a digital work than its physical counterpart, since we can’t skim to the end or feel the paper it’s printed on. The reading time estimate helps users to fit reading around their schedules, reducing the chance they’ll have to abandon an article halfway through. It also promotes the understanding that it’s OK to graze on short articles. Reading needn’t be just about marathons of concentration.

Article ordering is particularly important to CalmReader. The reverse chronological order – newest on top – seen in Instapaper and Readability doesn’t suit the calm mindset. Since newer articles persistently suppress older articles, reverse chronology risks creating a backlog of articles that you never get round to reading. Thus reading becomes equated with embarrassing procrastination. Instead of the full backlog, CalmReader shows just three articles when opened, guided by an algorithm that balances randomness, popularity and recency (more on that below). It displays the first few sentences to jog your memory and help you decide, but if these articles don’t take your fancy, tap the Different ones link and it will refresh the list.

This cherry-picking approach is deliberately non-comprehensive, meaning that CalmReader acts more as a reading suggestion service than a library of everything you’ve bookmarked. One downside of this approach is that it potentially hinders findability of specific articles. Scale exacerbates the problem: if you’ve added hundreds of articles, a graphical interface soon becomes cumbersome. Therefore, search plays a central role in CalmReader. Users can enter a search query to help them find a specific article (“Bahrain”), or to find articles that contain topic keywords of interest at that moment (“sport”, “design”, “pop”). To add richness, CalmReader adds hidden tags to each new URL (using the Delicious API, for example) – so a topic-based search like “Middle East” still retrieves articles that don’t feature the specific text.

We might also use APIs to harvest popularity metadata from social services such as Tweetmeme or Reddit. CalmReader then displays a simple preferences screen to allow users to give gentle weighting to either popular or lesser-known articles, for users who want to stray off the beaten track. Users can also bias the selection algorithm toward older or fresher material. This potentially complex weighting algorithm is largely hidden from the user. No need to expose the inner workings; it’s a simple reading app, after all.

So there we have it: just an experiment, and not one I’ll build (feel free to build it yourself if you like – ideas are cheap). But it’s interesting to consider how a few small design tweaks might fundamentally affect the nature of reading applications and remove some of the guilt that lingers around them. The world could use a little less stress.

Whatever a mouse user is doing, he is perpetually hovering. He might be hovering over a specific control, or over several places in the course of another action: dragging a scrollbar, selecting a word, even just idling around the screen. But until he has clicked, this user has taken no positive action. A click is unambiguous: the caveman pointing at the mammoth, the dog scratching at the door to go out. It cannot be done in the course of anything else.

Hover states can provide subtle visual cues that help the user understand how something works. A faint glow around a “favourite” star. An underline appearing underneath a link. But they should not be used for anything else. Hovering does not demonstrate user intent.

Designers who pop up information panels or move page elements on hover are using flawed logic, second-guessing what users want to do before they do it. The result, which I’ve seen in countless usability tests, is that users activate these controls accidentally. You know what happens? People actually flinch: “What was that?” They return with hesitation, less confident in their understanding of the site. It’s no accident that the Twitter worm propagated through hover—accidental activation meant users spread the worm unintentionally.

You may argue that hover states save space, and you can use hover panels to display supplementary information that helps the user know whether to click. It’s a feeble excuse. If the information is important, it should be on the screen already; if not, it should be omitted. The hover compromise shows only that you were too timid to make this decision.

Another compelling reason not to hide information behind hover is that you can’t rely on it being there. The approach prioritises one mode of input—the mouse—and makes information unavailable to people using keyboards, touchscreens and screenreaders. That’s not what your mother taught you.

Please, do your part. End hover abuse now.

Addendum: If you positively have to use hover popups, at least add a delay so they only activate if the user hovers for >500ms. It’s still no guarantee of intent, but it makes it a more likely probability.

Image: digital_monkey

In Part 1 we saw that the web presents an ideal vehicle for beauty, and in Part 2 I argued that beautiful design is reflective, exploring message and meaning. How can we use this knowledge to create beautiful websites?

Making the web beautiful

We are certainly making progress, and perhaps I’m being harsh on a field still in its infancy. The web is only 7,000 days old, after all. Technological improvements such as new authoring tools, better screen resolutions, more bandwidth and technical convergence will free us to experiment.

We’re already seeing fresh visceral approaches courtesy of developments such as CSS3, typographic tools like Typekit and Fontdeck, Canvas and SVG. Even the death of web-safe colours freed us to try new visceral design techniques. Better understanding of usability, better design patterns and better web education has also freed us to try new behavioural approaches, such as the horizontal, keyboard-driven navigation on Thinking For A Living. It’s too early to know whether these paradigms will stick, but it’s heartening to see previously locked-in approaches challenged.

However, the key to creating beautiful websites that our users actually love, rather than merely tolerate, is to think at the reflective level.

1. Get emotional

Appealing to emotion is an important way to create reflective design. It means we must understand people, not merely user tasks. What makes them tick? What would they never dream of asking for? How can we improve their life beyond this one visit? The focus is therefore on experience, not just usability. These days I see calling a website ‘easy to use’ as like praising a restaurant for serving edible food. It should be a given, not an exception.

One way to engender emotion is through stories – an area where what we patronisingly call ‘old media’ is streets ahead. Advertisers, writers and film makers have long known the power of narrative and created emotional content to reinforce their message. Content strategists in particular should therefore take centre stage in our quest for emotion, using not just text but other content types. Some of the most emotionally resonant content on the web today is photographic, such as Pictory or the Boston Globe Big Picture.

2. Think bigger

User and business form the classic duality of design. We’re well accustomed to solving for the needs of both, making compromises and tradeoffs where appropriate. I now believe this model overlooks a third piece of the puzzle: the ecosystem. We should design systems that are good for the surrounding web and for society.

Many experienced designers already consider this intuitively through their work, but there’s benefit in explicitly considering these issues in our design process. Are we trying to make a genuine difference, or just churning out more wireframes to keep the client happy?

3. Lead

When did you last see a statue of a committee? The classics of design have typically been created by one person with strong vision and the technical and political skills required to execute upon it. In film, this is known as the auteur theory: the director is regarded as the custodian of the creative vision and the final product is his or her realisation of it. At the least we need to appoint leaders who formulate and communicate a vision for the site.

Assuming leadership can be difficult in real business contexts and can foster problematic attitudes, but without strong leadership, clear vision and faithful execution, we have no hope of creating beauty.

4. Think long term

It’s relatively easy to make something viscerally attractive, but how can we maintain interest after the initial lust wears off? Just as in a romantic relationship, we should consider long-term seduction. The odd surprise can be rewarding, bringing joy in unexpected moments of the experience. By varying things we prevent over-familiarity and the contempt that this can breed.

Possible approaches include rewarding people who explore to deep areas of the system – a tactic frequently used by game designers – or something as simple as unannounced free shipping on your tenth order. Google’s holiday logos provide a real example of how the tiniest detail can keep users interested.

5. Notice everyday beauty

My mother, a retired teacher, told me recently of the ‘golden moment’ in education. It’s the point you always remember, when you discovered something and suddenly your worldview was shifted – that “one way valve to a new way of seeing” again. Educational theory suggests that to create golden moments, you must recognise them for yourself. So notice the world. Where’s the beauty around you?

As we previously discussed, there’s beauty all around us: art, writing, architecture, music, products, nature. We should breathe it in and learn from it. It may even be that inspiration lies close to home. Perhaps web standards specialists could take inspiration from developments in the Flash world, and vice versa. Maybe designers can be inspired by developers. We should be aware and scan the horizon to find our own golden moments.

6. Be brave

Finally, since reflective design is about meaning and message, we needn’t fear making statements. We should stand for something and convey ideals through our work: both ours and those of our clients. Surprisingly, the web design community seems reluctant to do this. At last year’s IA Summit, Jesse James Garrett asked why there are no schools of UX thought. Why indeed are there no major schools of web design thought? Our movements and sub-communities are, instead, almost entirely technique-driven. To me, it’s sad that we’re more interested in endlessly debating topics such as HTML5 v Flash, rather than exploring the important philosophical approaches that drive our work.

Caveats

There are of course some dangers to these approaches. The demands of client work mean we’d be unwise to blindly apply these rules, and there are some difficult questions left unanswered. The most important is whether beauty is always appropriate. I suspect not. When I’m filing a tax return, I don’t want the system to speak about who I am; I just want it to work. When getting the job done is more important than enjoying it, beauty is cruft. Better for designers to let the task and usability have priority.

Reflective design shouldn’t become dogma. Fortunately, when we take time to truly understand users and what they want, it soon becomes clear when it’s appropriate to strive for beauty in design.

Hero design

It would be easy to misinterpret our discussion of leadership and bravery and overestimate our authority. Designers aren’t heroes; instead we must serve our industry, our clients and our users faithfully, discarding ego. Too frequently, I see design that is more about impressing other designers than solving the problem and making the web better. There’s no beauty in hero design, only narcissism.

That said, I think web designers should appreciate that we can play an important role in society. We’re lucky enough to work on the coalface of the most exciting innovation of modern times. We’re on the brink of wonderful things. So yes, we’ve underachieved, but given the evolution of beauty and the tools now available to us, the web is an ideal vehicle for beautiful design. We’re the generation to turn that promise into action.

I hope in five years to look back on this essay and laugh. If we work hard, aim for reflective design, and believe in the power of the web, I’m convinced we can create our own beautiful design landmarks.

Three types of beauty

In Part 1 we saw that the web presents an ideal vehicle for beauty. But how will we know it when we see it? What is beauty anyway? I consider beauty to be presented in three main modes: universal, sociocultural and subjective.

Universal beauty

Universal beauty is based on timeless, globally accepted principles. It seems to hit at some innate response within us all, as demonstrated by the concept of human ‘averageness’. Here, we see a composite image of dozens of female faces created by Face Research. We might expect to see average attractiveness as a result, but this prototype is certainly more attractive than average. One theory is that prototypicality shows the mate has no defects and thus is likely to produce healthy offspring. Another theory claims that average faces are pleasing because the brain finds them easier to process. (Perhaps the average face is Plato’s ideal Form in the flesh).

Designing for universal beauty involves careful consideration of the fundamental aesthetic principles of design, such as symmetry, harmony, the rule of thirds and the golden ratio.

Sociocultural beauty

Sociocultural beauty is governed by the preferences of a particular time or place. This is most clearly seen in sexual attitudes.

Here we see Rubens’ Venus and a modern runway model: a clear depiction of changing sociocultural attitudes to beauty.

However, there are more subtle examples: fashion, music trends and even philosophical interpretations of the world all go in and out of style, regardless of their inherent universal beauty.

Subjective beauty

Subjective beauty is the wholly personal encapsulation of one’s likes and dislikes. If you like big butts and cannot lie, you’re merely exercising your right to a subjective opinion on beauty. While Rubens’ work is reflective of the Baroque era, it also reveals his subjective preference for larger models.

These three types of beauty are hierarchical. Subjective beauty can overrule sociocultural beauty: we can individually find beauty in things that society considers out of fashion. Sociocultural beauty can in turn overrule universal beauty: universally beautiful things may simply not be en vogue in a particular time or place.

Three modes of design

So how can we design for these types of beauty? Don Norman’s book Emotional Design gives a deep exploration of the role of emotion & beauty in design. Adapting an established model of cognitive processing, Norman claims design typically falls into one of three dominant modes.

Visceral design

Visceral design is aimed at our gut. We experience a visceral reaction when we bite into a sweet apple, see a stunning sunset or hear a harmonious chord – it’s entirely sensory, before the brain has a chance to shape the feeling. A positive visceral response is often called attraction – it’s what draws bees to flowers, or babies to a beautiful face.

To design for visceral response, we should concentrate on immediate properties of a system: shape, colour and form. These can make the instant impact required for a visceral reaction – we know, for instance, that visceral response to a website can occur in fractions of a second.

Visceral design was an early frontier of exploration for the web, once the technology was sufficiently mature. This early landrush of artistic, highly visual sites was helped by the advent of visually-oriented authoring tools such as Dreamweaver, which helped graphic specialists make the leap into the web arena with familiar UIs.

It is easy to belittle visceral design as ‘eye candy’, but without this immediate attraction, sites struggle to succeed in other modes of design. That said, visceral design’s clear failing is that it rewards attraction over usability and real beauty. Command-Shift-3, which describes itself as the HotOrNot of web design, has all the depth of a wet T-shirt contest. Since we can’t use the sites it features, we must judge solely on aesthetics. Visceral sites often win awards (since awards are rarely concerned with use) and appear in those ‘Top 20’ lists we all know and dread.

Behavioural design

Behavioural design is concerned with use. Does the system work? Is it easy to perform my tasks? Does it sustain flow, or make us suffer constant interruptions by not doing what we expect? To achieve successful behavioural design, we can call on our nearest ergonomist or usability specialist. She will ensure our design has appropriate dimensions, is well mapped to user mental models, is forgiving of improper use, sends clear messages about function, and so on.

No one can deny that the web usability movement has been successful. However, understanding the user’s tasks and crafting a site around them isn’t sufficient to bring us genuine beauty. The reason is that behavioural design doesn’t always trump visceral design. Social psychologists have found, for instance, that women prefer prototypically attractive men (square jaws, broad shoulders etc) for one-night stands and flings, but they choose more feminine, ‘nicer’ men for commitment: the so-called “cads and dads” theory. This pattern is particularly pronounced at certain points of the female ovulation cycle. In short, we don’t always plump for reliability; sometimes we need something more exciting.

Perhaps the usability movement has created too many dads, and too few cads. Critics often claim it has ‘made the web boring’ – and it’s true that, when misapplied, usability approaches can create very mediocre products. For a slightly daft example, look at the work of artists Vitaly Komar & Alexander Melamid, who surveyed the musical preferences of the general public. They asked opinions on instrumentation, tempo, pitch, duration and lyrical subject and assembled these into two musical extremes: the Most Wanted Song and the Most Unwanted Song.

The Most Wanted Song features a soft rock / R&B sound, using well established instruments. To quote the artists, it creates “a musical work that will be unavoidably and uncontrollably liked by 72% of listeners”. Unsurprisingly, this crowdsourced composition, designed for maximum ‘ease of listening’, is anything but beautiful.

Listening to The Most Wanted Song, we can almost understand why some people equate usability with tedium. While it can help our sites to become useful and profitable, it can’t make them beautiful. For that, we should aim at the third, most complex mode of design.

Reflective design

Reflective design reaches beyond visceral and behavioural design to look at message and meaning. It asks difficult questions. What does this system say about who I am? Does it improve my life? Am I glad I did it? These questions are subjective and complex, and our responses will vary with experience, personality, culture and even mood. But there are strong benefits to asking them. Successful reflective design makes us feel good: we show it off, tell others and repeat the experience. It can even change the way we think about things. In short, I believe that successful reflective design and beautiful design are one and the same.

Consider the Nextime Word Clock. It’s made from two cylinders that rotate so that the time can be read from the face: “Five minutes to ten” or “It’s about four”. It’s less accurate than a cheap digital watch and hence less usable – and, while it looks good, it’s not as elegant as an analogue clock. But, to me, this clock is an excellent example of reflective design. Its accuracy is appropriate for the living room (do you really need to know the difference between 2:57 and 2:58?) and its unconventional design is a conversation starter. I see beauty in the concept, and the product says something about me. It’s for these reasons, rather than usability or attraction, that I count this clock as one of my favourite possessions.

Where usability focuses on behavioural design, reflective design is more the domain of user experience. It involves truly understanding what makes people tick and what makes them excited. It involves creating something meaningful that changes perceptions. Reflective design is a relatively recent focus on the web, which is perhaps why we’ve not yet created beautiful websites. But with sufficient focus on experience, I believe we will.

Rate of change

These three modes of design – visceral, behavioural and reflective – move at different speeds, creating shearing layers (familiar from Stewart Brand’s How Buildings Learn).

Visceral trends come and go in a matter of months. Top 20 trends are quickly dated, be they illustration, fat footers or any other pattern du jour. Behavioural innovation is slower. Interaction design patterns and de facto standards (search box in the top right, logo and link to homepage in top left) emerge over the course of years and require more traction and mass support to become established. Reflective design moves the slowest of all. This is best demonstrated by ‘movements’ that define how we interact with the web – social media, the realtime web and so on – which take many years to emerge and stabilise.

Concluded in Beauty in web design, part 3.

The underachieving web

I think we’re underachieving. And I’m not alone in that belief. Armin Vit’s Landmark websites, where art thou? contended that the web design field has created nothing to rival the greats from other design fields, giving the examples of the NYC subway map, the Se7en titles and Paul Rand’s IBM logo. Jonathan Harris of WeFeelFine fame infamously contended at Flash On The Beach that there have been no masterpieces.

These acts of criticism stung the community. “But the web has changed the world!” This protectionist instinct is understandable, but while the web has indeed shaped modern life, I agree with Vit and Harris. The web’s sum is substantially greater than its parts. No one site stands as a landmark of design. Looking at some likely candidates – Google, Amazon, eBay, Facebook – we would all agree that they’ve changed how we interact with information, commerce and each other, but are they truly design classics or, instead, disruptive business models?

The web is full of cool, impressive and useful sites, but beauty is missing from modern web design. This is a surprise, given its prominence in other design fields.

Automotive design gives us beautiful cars that arouse passion and extraordinary desire. Product design also gives us 1954’s Fender Stratocaster, one of the most important cultural artifacts of the last century.

We see beauty in architecture, for example the Beijing National Stadium, which inspired a city, a country and a global watching public in a way no website has.

In visual fields, Harry Beck’s beautiful 1933 Tube map (which I’ll take over the NYC subway any day) clarified the complexity of the Underground through the metaphor of wiring. Not only is it a classic of wayfinding, but it has become part of the collective consciousness and emotional fabric of the city.

We also see a more chilling beauty in Charles Minard’s map of Napoleonic advance, made famous by Edward Tufte. The beige line represents the French army’s advance to Moscow; the black their ignominious retreat. The width of the line demonstrates the size of the army and hence the appalling human cost.

The point of beauty

But why focus on beauty? Why does it matter that other design fields lead the way? Because beauty affects us in profound ways, however we may try to resist.

Studies have shown, for instance, that attractive people are more likely to be acquitted by a jury. We transfer this lenience to content, as demonstrated in the 1960 Nixon-Kennedy presidential debates. The radio audience believed Nixon to have won the debate, while the TV audience felt the more attractive Kennedy had the upper hand. Surprisingly, this isn’t a learned bias; it seems to be hard-wired, even seen in infants.

Beauty also makes things easier to use. Our brains literally work in a different way, becoming more flexible when using a thing of beauty. This is the aesthetic-usability effect. Apple know the value of this effect more than most. The colour iMac heralded the first mainstream melding of beauty and hardware. When combined with the good user experience of the Mac OS, the iMac brought previously unengaged users to computing for the first time.

Beauty is also infectious. Because it makes us feel good, we naturally want to share it. Why do we put art on walls and take photos of sunsets? Because it allows us and others to relive the experience. This pattern of telling others about beautiful things is the cornerstone of loyalty and advocacy, powerful and much sought-after concepts.

But I believe the most powerful aspect of beauty is that it can change our perspective on the world. In the classic How Designers Think, architect and psychologist Bryan Lawson describes this as a “one way valve to a new way of seeing.” Not only could a beautiful web make our users happy, productive and loyal, but it could help to change the way the world thinks.

But can the web, an abstract, impermanent and functional medium, truly be beautiful? Let’s answer that by looking at a common vehicle for beauty: art.

The evolution of beauty

In Greek and Roman times, art (and the ideals of beauty it contained) was mimetic: that is, intended to mimic and replicate nature. This is consistent with the philosophy of the day. Plato’s Theory of Forms proposed that there exists one idealised, perfect instance of everything in the world – the perfect cow, the perfect grape – that exists on a plane that none can see. With beauty resident only in these ideal forms, art and sculpture were a means to study them. Every (literally) chiselled jaw is an exploration of the heavenly ideal. It’s from the Roman era that the word ‘art’ originates, tellingly coming from the Latin ars, meaning ‘skill’.

This style continued into Renaissance times; but while religious influence continued the thought that beauty exists in a heavenly plane, the Renaissance also introduced the earliest stirrings of humanism. From this point, beauty became apparent in things that mankind created.

As we advance into the Romantic era, art is no longer literal. Representation becomes central. Turner’s 1839 The Fighting Temeraire is beautiful but not accurate. Instead, the viewer finds joy in the colours and emotive qualities of both the scene and the meaning. This abandonment of the literal was catalysed by 19th century technology. The invention of the daguerrotype, the microphone, and the printing press some centuries previous, allowed reality to be easily replicated for the first time.

As we move into the modern era, art takes a jarring yet consistent turn. Duchamp’s concept of objets trouvés (such as Fountain) mean anything can have artistic meaning in the right context. Subjectivity dominates: it’s beautiful if you find it beautiful.

Contemporary conceptual art now sees execution as secondary. Beauty lies within the thought, while the artifact itself can be banal and everyday. Tracey Emin’s Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995 stitched the names of former lovers, friends and unborn children into the fabric of a cheap tent. Damien Hirst’s diamond-encrusted skull (For The Love Of God) was made by technicians and interns: Hirst himself was director and project manager only. Duchamp himself permitted several replicas of his work. The idea is all.

Finally, we can examine installation art, designed for a specific space and a specific duration. It is by its nature temporary, and often interactive. 2005 Turner Prize winner ShedBoatShed (Mobile Architecture No. 2) was disassembled and reconstructed as a boat and sailed down a river. Tate Modern’s helter skelter ‘Test Site’ created enormous school holiday queues. Is it art? You choose.

Classification aside, it’s certain that many people find this work powerful.

So our understanding of beauty has broadened and shifted. Beautiful things can be abstract, temporary, duplicate and interactive.

The web is all of these.

Continued in Beauty in web design, part 2.

Here’s an excerpt of a comic that recently did the rounds in the web design community.

You know what? I’m tired of this attitude.

Clients From Hell is admittedly pretty funny. Sometimes clients say stupid things; but hey, so do designers. I’ve said lots of them myself. But this sort of thing is different. It’s not an amusingly misguided email. Rather, it epitomises a harmful arrogance and entitlement that pervades the design community. It carries a bitter subtext that clients are idiots with no design skill, and it’s a designer’s duty to disempower them by any means possible.

And I’m tired of it. Of course clients aren’t skilled designers; that’s why they had the foresight to hire us. But you know what? They know business. They’re as passionate, committed and talented as anyone. Many of them put their livelihoods on the line to make the web happen. And let’s be blunt: they also pay our salaries.

If a web design project goes to hell this way, I usually blame the designer. He wasn’t skillful enough to make the situation work. He didn’t provide the force of argument required, couldn’t handle the politics, or couldn’t convince the client of the value of good design. On the rare occasion when the relationship with a client goes entirely rotten, the designer should end the relationship gracefully rather than passive-aggressively working to rule.

Unconvinced? I suggest you read Scott McCloud’s excellent post about criticism and the equally insightful comment from Mike L:

“The most common misconception about criticism is that one has to be on a similar skill level as the creator in order to have a valid opinion. I read stuff from many different artists from many different disciplines who cannot abide ramblings of people that couldn’t compete with them in some way. If said person is not an artist, their opinion doesn’t matter. But isn’t art, all art about communication? And who is the artist generally trying to communicate with? … My #1 critic is someone who cannot draw at all. He tells me things I can’t see because I overthink them as an artist.”

(Oh, and here’s what ‘pop’ means.)

After a while on the fringes of our collective consciousness, HTML5 is finally getting the attention it deserves. The development community (as typified by the SuperFriends) has come together to debate practical elements of the spec, argue over the inclusion of controversial elements, and assess the timeframe over which we can unleash HTML5 in the wild.

However those of us more accustomed to the world of Post-Its, sketches, and .psds – the designers – haven’t been so vocal. Perhaps we’ve been distracted by the bright lights of CSS3 and those surface thrills we’ve longed for. (Rounded corners! Gradients! Transparency!) Or, alternatively, we’ve been in the thrall of @font-face and looking forward to the coming age of passable web typography.

Understandable. But it’s time designers got excited about HTML5 too.

Partly, it’s just good practice. Whatever your flavour of design – visual, web, interaction, user experience – knowing the native technology makes you better at your job. Just as composers should understand the capabilities of the orchestra’s instruments, designers need to understand the language of the web.

But there’s more to HTML5 than simply keeping our skills sharp. It could make a big difference to the way we design for the web.

Semantic elements

Information architects (and, by extension, user experience designers) should be excited by the new HTML5 elements – <nav>, <header>, <aside> and so on. While they won’t immediately revolutionise today’s web, they’re an investment for the future. Doing useful stuff with information is the central theme of IA, and therefore its practitioners should be at the forefront of the new experiences that machine-readable semantics will offer. HTML5 allows us to mark text up in a more meaningful way than a sea of <div>s, meaning we’ll soon see applications appearing at a sub-page level. We’ve started to scratch the surface – think about the Operator toolbar or customisable UIs à la iGoogle – but we’ll need detailed design thinking to work out how to bring the benefits of semantic richness to the end user.

APIs and other extensions

While it’s clear that some of the HTML5 APIs are far from perfect right now, when they’re refined they will offer us intriguing new opportunities and challenges.

Designers of location-based services should of course find the geolocation API invaluable. [I stand corrected. See isgeolocationpartofhtml5.com.] The contentEditable attribute gives us further power to make the web truly read/write without resorting to JavaScript and custom interfaces. New input types (eg type=”search”) can provide extra visual cues about input function, although of course this depends on the solutions chosen by the browser manufacturers.

Until now, it’s been easy to consider our domain as bounded by the viewport and the web server. But HTML5 is another step toward seamlessness: the merging of desktop, offline and online. For instance, the drag and drop API could see the line between online and desktop experience blur further. Local storage could allow for a web-like experience in areas of poor connectivity. This convergence is clearly a good thing, but we must also design how to expose those hidden seams at the user’s request. Users should stay in control of how their locations are published and what data is synchronised to their machine.

<video>, <audio>, <canvas>

There is of course something of a reported schism between the standards world and the Flash world. Some see the advent of these new media elements (particularly <canvas>) as heralding the death of Adobe’s poster child.

I don’t think this is either likely or desirable. Neither technology is perfect. Flash is, of course, proprietary and thus subject to the whims of a third party that stands between browser and user. <canvas> has known accessibility problems. But the two can live in harmony, if we play to their respective strengths. Some current Flash applications might be better suited to <canvas>, particularly those based around dynamic visualisation: graphs, animations, infographics. Some applications will benefit from the powerful capabilities of Flash: games, heavily interactive widgets.

This aside, there’s clearly a user experience benefit in not having to rely on an external plugin to play rich media elements, and it will be interesting to see the uptake of the <video> and <audio> elements. Although it will initially be down to browser makers to define the interface elements involved, we will need to figure out how to integrate them into everyday web experiences. The good news is that they can be styled in the same way as any other HTML element. If your visual aesthetic relies on slanted images with box shadows, it’s trivial to apply this to video too.

That said, we can’t ignore the elephant in the room: the thorny codec issue. I’m sure we’d all agree that the sooner it’s resolved, the better.

What can designers do?

Only the most patient and detail-oriented designer will relish the idea of reading the spec in full and arguing the finer points on the WHATWG list. That’s just not the way designers roll.

But as a community it’s important that we start talking about HTML5. If you’re new to HTML, now’s a great time to learn. HTML5Doctor and A preview of HTML5 give useful guidance on the differences between HTML5 and its predecessors. Above all, designers should get chatting with their developer friends: there can’t be many left who no longer have an opinion on this technology. How do they see their practices changing? What can we do today to prepare our sites for the advent of HTML5? How can we build on its strong points to make the web a better place?

We don’t yet know what we’ll accomplish with HTML5, but then it’s not often that the vocabulary of the web changes this deeply. However, one thing is clear: if we prepare now, we have a great chance to bring innovation to our users’ online lives.

South By Southwest voting.

I’m sure it’s a system that works excellently for the organisers. The pleas for votes market the conference, and those who plead well are likely to fill a room easily. Most importantly, it reduces the numbers from 2,000 to something considerably more manageable.

On one hand, I’m unsure how a conference with such sprawling breadth can be relevant to many professionals. I’m also not convinced a global desert get-together at which the alcohol takes centre stage is a Good Thing during a recession.

On the other hand, like Glastonbury, perhaps everyone should go once. So let’s make this quick. I’d appreciate your backing for my two proposals:

• Beauty In Web Design (solo)
• Design Perfect Site Navigation (panel member)

While you’re at it, feel free to have a poke around at The .net Awards. Clearleft have been nominated for Agency Of The Year, and our work for the WWF has been put forward for Redesign Of The Year.

My work is used by millions.

When the thought first struck the numbers were lower, but I was stunned. I quickly surmised the only way I could retain objectivity and impartiality was to bury this thought, but it wouldn’t leave me alone. I’m hoping that I can now make sense of it by voicing it.

Of course the scale of the web excites me; I’m delighted and humbled that my work can communicate with so many people. Very few roles have such scale. Architecture, perhaps. Journalism. Politics too, although I’m hardly comfortable with that comparison.

While I admit that it’s something of an egocentric thrill, I’m no household name and nor do I wish to be. Web design is far less important than, say, teaching or healthcare. What matters more to me is that I do great work, and having a large canvas provides me with fascinating ways to achieve this.

However, while the web makes it easier for one person to reach millions, it doesn’t make the relationship easier to comprehend. My excitement is tempered by vertiginous apprehension. From these millions, there will be thousands who love my work. There will also be thousands who hate it: people who relied on the old site, who appreciated a section I removed, whose needs I’ve overlooked in the hurry to get the job done.

With such scale, these users are anonymous to me, just as I am to them. While I work hard to understand them and design to support their needs, there’s no way I can know I’ve improved things for an individual user. I hope I’ve done right by them.

The angst of the user experience designer.