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On art direction
The recent redesign by Jason Santa Maria, designer of the very pleasant Wordpress 2.5 admin interface, got me thinking. He calls his approach “a very simple setup for fast design and art direction around content”. Basically he built an EE-powered website in which every post has it’s own custom design. All the designs fit together in some grand scheme, which brings us to that fancy word, art direction.
Zeldman wrote a piece about this too, happy cogging as always, in which I noted in the comments “You have to give the guys at A Brief Message some credit, they’ve been doing it for months now“. A date check on the latest brief message reveals that the latest piece is dated March 24th. I can only assume art direction on the web is hard to keep up, very much if it’s hobbyism, not professional.
In further subject-related linkage, HUGE (an international design firm) has some wonderfully customized pages. If you can look past their FOUC be ready for some exploring to do. Every page is seemingly custom designed, but all of them still follow the same direction.
In a recent article, Gregory James Wood (of Erskine fame) encourages web designers to focus on layout more than they do. He feels most websites do not go further than Blogger-style templates. His closing point is the strongest of the whole article: “After all how logical really is it to present content that varies wildly in exactly the same way?”. Wood cites Ben Saunder’s North Pole speed record website as an example, which I personally think is a job well done - but it still feels very standard in layout. Nothing compared to the the niceties I see every month in Wired, for instance.
One can wonder, why a magazine like Wired spend tons of cash on custom illustrations, layouts, photography, typefaces ét all for the print version of the magazine, while the editors of the online version box the illustrations up, caption them, and float them to one side or the other.
Is web design limited to our fancy use of Georgia? It it just not worth doing art direction on the screen? Does it not combine well with the fast-publishing-time-is-money zeitgeist? Or can we truly say that it is technically too hard to achieve real art direction on the web?
A lot of web designers have few real design skills, and a lot of print designers do not have the web skills to bring what they do to the internet. It’s time to bridge some gaps. Reading the latest issue of Before & After I muttered to myself to stop overestimating myself (as a designer), for there is so much that I don’t know. Let’s get back to work, then; and when the time is right, do some art directing, if you will.