I got some feedback from my recent IMedia Brand Summit presentation, Bad homepages shred brand messages. The feedback dealt with my statement that you could use elements of art and art history as guides in web design. The feedback was negative because the feedbacker, a web designer, didn't think art or art history had anything to do with web design. I'm having a hard time figuring out where to put that, actually. A primarily visual medium with practitioners who elect to not make use of some 10,000 years of art history and tradition in their work?
Whoa!
This is even more intriguing to me when I read something like the Nature magazine article: Science in culture: A sense of proportion that deals with the fact that modern visual communications couldn't have come about without the geometric insights of the Old Masters, something I've commented on before.
The rest of this post contains my response. My thoughts might answer others' questions or prove useful in other ways. The feedbacker's comments are in regular type, my responses are in italic.
Can you provide some statistics on this?You can find a fairly complete bibliography at "Where You Should Stick Your Ad and Why" IMedia Column Bibliography and an agonizingly long bibliography at Color Research Bibliography and Paper Now Available. I also cover this in some detail in chapter 9 of my next book.
This may be an okay observation for criticizing art work in western culture. But it is one of the most ridiculous things I have ever heard in my career as a web designer.
If I understand your statement correctly, you differentiate web design from art. I'd need an explanation before I could respond to this with something other than confusion.
You are ignoring cultural differences that may arise in visual communication.
I completely agree that what I was saying was specific to western cultural traditions. I normally make that quite clear in my presentations and often go on to explain how different cultures place things differently in their visual fields. My apologies if I failed to make this clear in this presentation.
You are also ignoring basic web usability guidelines and design guidelines.
I also hope I made clear that my background is in neither usability nor design. Those are not my fields of study. My background is in how people interact with their environments. To that point, often how people are designed to interact with their environments doesn't lend itself well to current best practices in usability and design. However, if you're patient with me, I'm always willing to learn.
Thanks for your feedback,
Joseph
Please contact NextStage for information regarding presentations and trainings on this and other topics.
Links for this post:
- AllBusiness.com's Chris Bjorklund Interviews Joseph Carrabis on Color Use in Marketing, Q8: Image Tricks
- Shared Traits of Great Web Design
- Websites: The Secret to Landing Pages and Shopping Carts
- XChange on 20-21 Sept 07
- DC Emetrics Summit on 14-17 Oct '07
- Society for New Communications Research Annual Research Symposium & Awards Gala on 5-6 Dec 07 in Boston.
Comment Preview