Standing in the Drop Shadow of Usability

There’s a crucial part of interface design that vexes me and it’s iconography, the discipline of crafting highly communicative, aesthetically efficient pictorial symbols in miniature. It takes a special combination of artistry, patience and visual economy in order to get it right, and I’m in awe of everyone who has this skill. (I’ll say also that there are many folks who are competent at this art form, but exceedingly few who are truly good at it.)

What confounds me about iconography, though, is only partly the fact that I’m astoundingly no good at it. It’s also the idea that the idiom of icons, at least in its current state, stands at a polar opposite to my own sensibility. To be specific: the majority of commonly accepted and commercially functional icons in use today are visually literal — they represent objects or combinations of objects, even if they are intended to stand in for abstract concepts — and they’re almost exclusively dimensional.

By contrast, I like incredibly abstract and minimal graphical elements. For me, a simple, one-pixel straight line is practically a revival of the Rococo style. If I had my way, the only pictorial components of my design work would be the pictures: photographs or illustrations. Everything else would be simple and elementally native to the browser, or whatever other rendering mechanism I’m working with. Which is to say, you’d only ever see lines and boxes — and flat ones at that. No shading, please, and no three-dimensional modeling.

Continue Reading …

+

Sustainability, Schmastainability

It’s been a long time since I’ve worked in print, so I don’t often think about the wonderful world of paper. As a print designer working in a design studio, you tend to think a lot about the stuff; what paper to run a job on, what it costs, who stocks it, where it comes from, etc. To be honest, it bored the living heck out of me; there were few things that I found more tiresome than rifling through an endless and disorderly stack of paper samples, each one obtusely named in a vain attempt to differentiate white from, um, really white.

I almost never think about paper companies, either. Until I got heavily involved with AIGA again, I had almost forgotten about their enormous influence in the design community. And their deep, deep pockets. In spite of the portents of doom for printed matter, paper companies continue to spend freely to promote their wares, or at least that’s my outsider’s impression.

Continue Reading …

+