Web Directions

Andy Clarke — Inspired design

• In: notes
• By:Andrew
• September 29, 2006
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• I’m not going to talk about CSS today, I’m hardly going to men­tion standards
• Art is design with­out com­pro­mise — Jeffrey Veen
• Limitations of what we do: Environmental – inflex­i­bil­ity of 2D screen; Materials – lim­i­ta­tions of CSS et all; Medium – poor sup­port in older browsers; Ourselves – unlearn­ing what we have learned from past experience
• The web is only ten yours old, we really don’t know what we’re doing for the most part
• Standards advo­cates are still a very small pro­por­tion of the entire indus­try – it’s time to let go of what we’ve done in the past and focus on what we can do in the future.
• Classic CSS resources like bluer​o​bot​.com and noo­dle inci­dent used absolute posi­tion­ing; while we have moved away from that method now, Andy believes it will make a return due to the increas­ing abil­ity to use 24 and 32 bit PNGs, amongst other options. Absolute posi­tion­ing is the new DOM scripting
• It’s not about the tech­nolo­gies, it’s about what we can do with them
• How can we use design to get across that deeper message?
• I don’t think we’ve even started to know what to do with the tech­nolo­gies that we use […] we need to con­tinue to be play­ful, we need to con­tinue experimenting
• Designing for the web is start­ing to lean fur­ther away from graphic design and closer to phys­i­cal design; we can’t let the graphic design side of web design stag­nate just because we’ve realised the impor­tance of inter­ac­tion design.
• We’re try­ing to build web based prod­ucts that peo­ple love and want to use. Aesthetics play a huge role in get­ting peo­ple to love your site.
• Why do I use ma.gnolia over del​.icio​.us? They pro­vide essen­tially the same ser­vice […] It’s because it does more for me aesthetically.
• The web isn’t a power drill — Andy. It’s a series of tubes! — John Allsopp
• There is a wider world out there and we need to remem­ber that it’s not just about our small community
• Utilitarian sites (eg: ama​zon​.com) are not a plea­sure to use, we go there because we want to achieve some­thing. I go in, I get what I want and I get out!
• Andy feels strongly that we need to work harder to bring in more exter­nal influ­ences (away from the web); I cer­tainly agree – re-​​sampling from the shal­low pond just makes the prob­lem worse. Drop shad­ows Rounded cor­ners Reflections, anyone?
• Sample of scrap-​​booking shown — I like to get the clients involved in the design before we’ve even picked up a copy of Photoshop. Used to get the client to clearly explain the mood the want their site to achieve
• Take influ­ence from the mod­ern art world – found objects in the real world are a great source of inspiration.
• I hear all the time that the web isn’t print, but that doesn’t mean we can’t learn from the print world
• To design an eCom­merce site, why not check out cook­ing mag­a­zines or other print media relat­ing to the prod­ucts your site will sell. Is Amazon really the height of what an eCom­merce site can be? I don’t think so.
• Where ever I go, I col­lect side­bars (mag­a­zine sidebars)
• The Grid – print has hun­dreds of years in expe­ri­ence in uti­liz­ing white­space, con­trol­ling pro­por­tions and other core design skills. Web design needs to re-​​embrace those fun­da­men­tal skills and make them our own. While the ter­mi­nol­ogy between print design and CSS design is dif­fer­ent, the build­ing blocks are essen­tially the same.
• It’s not the tech­nol­ogy that’s lim­it­ing me any­more, it’s my own inspi­ra­tion (con­text: IE7 and native sup­port for trans­par­ent PNGs across major browsers)
• Look to other cul­tures as well as other medi­ums for inspi­ra­tion. Andy shows exam­ples of Arabic, Japanese and Russian news­pa­pers; each with their own use of the grid and each dif­fer­ent from what we would in most west­ern newspapers.

3 responses to “Andy Clarke — Inspired design”:

1. • By:Velvet Unravelled » Blog Archive » Andy Clarke (part 2)
   • September 29th, 2006

   […] The amaz­ing Andrew has done a far bet­ter job of blog­ging the pre­sen­ta­tion at the Web Directions blog post Andy Clarke — Creating Inspired Design […]

2. • By:Sara Lander
   • September 29th, 2006
   

   Andrew, if the web devel­op­ment gig doesn’t work out for you you’d be an excel­lent court stenog­ra­pher! Or per­haps you could write Hansard :)

   Thanks so much for this, I am really dis­ap­pointed to be miss­ing just about every­thing but this way I get to get the gist of the pre­sen­ta­tions (and read my husband’s quips before he recounts them to me in tri­umph later)

3. • By:WD06 - Day 4 Musings at Mad Web Blog
   • October 23rd, 2006

   […] Andy Clarke gave an inspi­ra­tional speech about look­ing beyond the header/​sidebar/​content/​footer lay­outs we’ve all used a mil­lion times before, and to look for our muse every­where. The print world con­tin­u­ally strives for orig­i­nal­ity, and while it is less restricted than us webby folk, we should try not to limit our­selves to sim­ply doing what we’ve always done. Take influ­ence from mag­a­zines, not just for lay­out and colour schemes, but also the lit­tle things often over­looked, like side­bars, clip-​​out forms, pho­tographs and prod­uct lists.There was one point that Andy made that I dis­agreed with. He said that he pre­ferred Ma​.gno​lia​.com to Del​.icio​.us for his social book­mark­ing needs, purely on the visual design. I don’t know if it was a state­ment about form over func­tion, or maybe Ma.gnolia works bet­ter for the way he uses social book­mark­ing apps, or maybe it’s just a per­sonal pref­er­ence between two sim­i­larly func­tion­ing web apps. Maybe, and its entirely pos­si­ble, but maybe I just missed the point. […]

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