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Website Graphics: The Best of Global Design - Review
Art Journal, Spring, 1999 by Johanna Drucker
This doesn't mean that all features of digital imaging technologies or computer human interface in graphic, visual terms have been resolved. Quite the contrary. For instance, from the moment that the computer industry designed software so that desk tops performed through the manipulation of icons, the primacy of visual imagery was established as a fundamental feature of information technology. The fuller implications of this decision, and the intuitive logic that propelled it, have only recently begun to be clear. Even the intense industry competition between Macintosh and Microsoft operating systems can be traced in part to the early success of Apple's user-friendly, visually coded interface of trash cans, pointing hands, and drag-and-drop mouse commands. So transparent are the visual metaphors enabling complex data processing tasks that most users accept them literally, without questioning the operational complexity lying beneath the interface.
Most people still make contact with electronic media, imagery, and art mainly through desk-top computers and the Web. The online environment poses new challenges for graphic designers. They now not only have to achieve fluency with existing software, but must be trained for a more fundamental change of task: a broader understanding of visual information design as the link between individual users and information management. The graphic designer's task has shifted from the shaping of a viewing, reading environment, to that of structuring the interconnected operations of elaborate data bases whose functions have to be facilitated (not simply represented) through a graphic interface. Just as that drag-and-drop gesture of pulling a file into a trash-can icon combines image and functionality, so the new interfaces have to offer seamless and intuitive procedures that can quickly pass as conventions. While this is one thing when managing inventory in an online shopping situation, it is another entirely in coordinating the multiple functions of a large site where security of access to information, continually changing assets, and multiple and simultaneous uses for data are all components of the system.
Online design has had its visionaries, and when David Siegel's Creating Killer Websites came out in 1996, it made high-profile contributions to the vocabulary and premises that have shaped the field. He, along with other leading online designers such as Clement Mock and Roger Black, pushed the evolution of Web designs beyond their original text and page analogies in the flat-screen, scroll-down, linear format of first-generation sites. Second-generation sites used visual icons and hot links to organize information in top-down hierarchies from menu to files. Third-generation sites, like those touted by this book, are metaphor driven, with multiple-access navigational routes connecting information. Siegel's technical expertise allows him to offer still-useful guidelines for successful Web designs within these limited parameters. His list of "deadly sins" and pragmatic pointers makes for a site that downloads efficiently on existing technology. (Designers are cautioned to assume the site user will possess the least amount of transmission power, the oldest generation of browser, a small screen, and a slow chip in the receiving computer.) Siegel was willing to sacrifice much in the way of information management for the sake of immediate user gratification, but taking on data management tasks requires a conceptual foundation that goes beyond quick downloading of files cleverly designed for display.
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