Design is inseparable from the technology available to us. What we know about history from photos is dependent on the camera technology of the time. Modern typefaces could not be invented until printing presses were widely used. This week is about the connection between creativity and constraint in design, and the balance between expression and function.
Creativity & Constraint
All types of design are a balance between creativity and constraints. This is especially true in user-centered design, which puts people and their needs at the center of the design process.
User-centered design asks: What do people need from this? How will they interact with it? What aids or hinders their goals? For example, even the most creative architecture is constrained by the physical size and needs of human bodies. If a space doesn’t work for people, it’s less useful.
The Guggenheim Museum in New York has striking and unique architecture by renowned architect Frank Lloyd Wright, but it still needs to serve its primary purpose of being a functional museum open to the public. (Image sources: exterior, interior, interior looking down)
Fashion is another example. Some fashion designers create amazing and impractical designs that push the boundaries of fashion in exciting ways, but these are not user-centered designs that people could wear in everyday life. Designers who make functional everyday clothing have very different goals.
The Met Gala is known as an event for fashion designers to bring out their most inventive and over-the-top designs, even though many of them are barely wearable.
User-Centered Design in Media
Visual design is the same. Both print and digital products can be creative, but they need to fit within certain constraints to be useful. Some of these constraints are technological, some are based on the user’s needs, and some are based on what users expect. New ideas can be exciting, but they are also intimidating. People like things that feel familiar.
When Gutenberg made his Bible on the new printing press, he made up a typeface that resembled the handwriting of monks, because that’s what people were used to.
When personal computers started becoming popular, the interfaces were designed to use skeuomorphisms like “folders” and a trash can icon to make an intimidating new technology feel more familiar.
When newspapers first created websites and published articles online, they tried to make it as much like the print product as possible. Stories were posted every morning, just once per day, and used exactly the same headlines and photos that were in the print paper for that day. But pretty soon editors and publishers realized those old constraints no longer existed — a newspaper could post breaking news anytime of day on a website, and a story could have a whole gallery of photos instead of choosing just one. Headlines could be written differently to make them easier to find in a web search.
This also applies to something as small and simple as a hyperlink on a webpage. Once upon a time, no one knew how to use links because they didn’t exist before the internet. But it quickly became a commonly used feature because it serves a user need. Whether you’ve ever thought about it or not, you’re familiar with the design conventions of hyperlinks. In a paragraph, we expect links to look slightly different from the rest of the surrounding non-link text. We expect a slight reaction when hovering on a link.
- A web designer could design a link to look no different and have no reaction when you hover, but this would be ineffective because most people would never see it.
- A web designer could do something zany like make the text enormous when you hover on it, but that would be unexpected and confusing.
Both of these choices would be unconventional, which is risky. Unconventional is often a good thing in art, because creativity and risk-taking is exciting in art. In design, however, confusing your users is not an effective way to communicate. You have to be very careful about going against expectations.
Creative vs. Conventional Health Messages
Brands and public health agencies took different approaches to visuals in their PSAs about coronavirus precautions. Here are five examples from early in the pandemic: three standard approaches from health departments in Hawaii, Minnesota and Pennsylvania, and two less conventional approaches from Coca-Cola and the Oregon Health Authority.
🗨 Overall, do you think the standard or less conventional messages work better for communicating with the public, and why?
✓ Review: The Coca-Cola advertisement makes use of spacing between letters to visually correspond with the public health concept of social distancing. What is the typography term for spacing adjustment between letters?