Joakim Norman

A few years ago I read a book that had a profound impact on my life. Not immediately, but slowly and firmly. It’s called “The substance of style“, it’s a book about design and was written by Virginia Postrel many years ago.

The basic point it makes is that aesthetics, or style, has a function. And that this function is just as important to us as other, perhaps more tangible, functions.

And the attitude that style is worthless if it doesn’t have some logical function is what it tries to change. Since style is harder to grip and harder to formulate in words, it’s often underestimated and left behind in favor of the tangible functions.

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I’m gonna kick in an open door here. Wait for it. Wait for it. Wait for it. Design blogs are making us too conformed. Bam! Door down.

Anyway. I’m a confessed design blog junkie. I have a list of 50 or so design related blogs I visit nearly every day. I love the inspiration and the stab of jealousy when I found something really great.

But those are same blogs everyone else is looking at. So everyone else gets the exact same inspiration. A slight exaggeration, yes.

But this becomes a real problem when the only point of reference graphic designers include in their lives is the work of other graphic designers. And even more so when it’s almost exclusively contemporary.

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In 2007-08 Hyper Island had it’s first year of the Interactive Art Director program. And I was in it. I actually applied to the Digital Media program, but the staff asked me if I would consider joining the IAD program instead. To me it felt like an upgrade, so I did it.

During that year I learnt a lot of stuff.  But there’s stuff I didn’t learn, that I wish I had. Things that I’ve tried to convince Hyper Island to introduce in their classes, to def ears. I’m going to talk about that here.

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One of the last things I do when I deliver a design project to a production company is to animate it. I import my design elements into After Effects and start animating how I want the site to interact with the user. This is the last 3% of the design, and it’s something a lot of web designers don’t do.

Instead they leave it up to the programmers or the art director at the production company. Sometimes this works fine, because some production companies are very good at this. Usually the expensive ones. But most of the time, in my view, production companies are pretty bad at bringing a user interface to life. So it’s up to you to make it a priority.

Of course there’s a lot of different reasons for animating your interface. Not least in usability terms. But I’m gonna concentrate on another reason for this post:

Quality.

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I was mocking up stuff in photoshop for a presentation this afternoon. And I was copying dummy text from lipsum.com into my layout. The text I copied was this:

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit.

If there was one thing I’d change about each of the workplaces I’ve ever worked in – it’d be the domination of computers. For every license of photoshop at an studio, I’d like to see two square meters dedicated to more analogue methods. I’d like to see every tool I can use to create the stuff in reality, that Photoshop imitates. I’d like a whole lotta papers, scalpels, paints, printers etc. Maybe even a little wood working area.

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