This is my report on “Breaking the Frame of Web Design” Presented by Fritz McDonald.

Fritz is the Creative Director at Stamats. He supervises web and print designers as well as writers. His ideas regarding breaking out of the web design “frame” are influenced in part by author Brendan Dawes.

(Fritz McDonald begins his talk.)

After listening to Fritz, I’m going to riff on his idea of the “frame” in web design for a bit before giving you the run-down of his points. I think that root concept is probably the most interesting part of his presentation. It was certainly the only part of it that was new to me (and maybe to you folks).

Web Design has undergone a kind of evolution common to many types of emerging paradigms. Simply put, when new systems begin, they are energized by inspired and inspiring prophets. The beginning is a kind of limitless creative time. At some point, after enough different ideas have been tried and failed or succeeded, the new system begins to become standardized and reified. Sociologist Max Webber called this the “routinization of creativity” and applied it to the historical development of religions, but I think much the same can be applied to the web.

When the internet largely arrived in the public world, mostly after the very limited dial-in BBS’s, there was this sense of a new, digital frontier. “The Information Superhighway” was the popular term among the laity, and the prophets discussed cyberspace—an entire world bound only by the imagination and the limits of technology. Many of us watched in awe as computer graphics and virtual reality developed, imagining what the internet may be like in a few years. The first chat rooms and online communities became not only a communication tool but clung to that driving metaphor of a mental space. Early web design began to reflect this with sites that had metaphoric navigation (rooms and doors), or else were built as information environments intended to be explored in a nonlinear fashion. In design terms, this was a time for abusing HTML in ways that the code’s creators had never intended.

At some point, the process of limitless creativity met the business world where the creative development had a specific purpose, was measurable, and cost money. The result was market-based design, usability, designing sites with some sort of conversion intended, and the assumption that users (not visitors) came to either complete a task or ask a question but not to explore or experience. The most obvious and least expensive solution was to apply the grid-based layout systems used in print media. This is part of what Fritz described as “the frame.” With the dominance of the frame, cyberspace, virtual reality, and allot of the creativity in web design went the way of the flying car.

(Fritz describes much of today’s standard web design as coming from USA Today.)

The frame exists all over in the way that the world is designed. In fact, it is nearly ubiquitous when describing doorways into mental places. Think about it—windows, doors, television screens, movie screens, pages, text, and photographs are all presented to the world in square or rectangular frames. Fritz said he thought it was the reflection of a male urge to order his environment. Fritz also blamed the browser wars, the frameset tag, and seemed to link “standards-based design” to “standardized” looking websites. I’m not sure I agree on that part. The point is that a medium that started as limitless and could be described by any number of poignant metaphors became over the years just another representation of a newspaper page designed to be easily scanned for text-based information with a few graphic elements thrown in. Chat rooms and virtual environments are largely gone, replaced with instant messenger clients that are little more than text-only telephones. Where once we imagined a world where you could be fully immersed in a digital environment, now we are impressed at the ability to embed video in a website. Why? Because we don’t expect a website to do any more than a newspaper or book because it is designed just like one.

Fritz described websites that break the frame as those that encourage the user to participate, think, and experience. He advocates bucking the “don’t make me think” trend began by Steve Krug, especially where higher education websites are concerned. Instead, he believes that aesthetics should stand on a level with usability. Fritz described how design, in all aspects of our lives, is improving and increasing with the end result that the aesthetic bar is being raised. Instead of continuing to design websites for the largest common denominator, using a “herd” model to move “users” through the site, Fritz suggests exploring what it means to design for the individual—the human being.

During the presentation, Fritz asked how many understood the soul of their institution and very few people raised their hands. (I did, unfortunately, because he wanted me to share it in a few sentences and I sure didn’t have an elevator speech ready…) He also asked how we could convey the institution’s soul in the design of the site. As an example, he discussed some young people who have created personal brands to describe themselves. These teens create logos and apparel around their personal brand as a way of differentiating themselves from those who wear GAP or the like. If creative teens can articulate how to communicate the essence of who they are as a person in a brand way, then why can’t a college?

Fritz gave several examples of sites that he thinks attempt to break out of the frame. Here are the few I could jot down (We ended up having trouble with the hotel’s stupid Waypoint and not being able to see many of the examples.):

bbdo.com
fullsail.com
modernista.com
www.kpf.com

In the end he went through several of the nitty-gritty barriers and possibilities for breaking out of the frame (things like trimming bloated sites, using basic design elements, campus buy-in), but they were all fairly straightforward things many of us have encountered in the past so I won’t recount them.

I’ll leave you with the bullets from one of his slides that stuck with me as particularly poignant:

* From user-centered to human-centered
* From accessible websites to websites worth looking at
* From sites that serve our needs to sites that we remember
* From separate approaches to one balanced philosophy

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 11th, 2006 at 1:23 am and is filed under Branding, Design, Higher Education, Marketing. It has been viewed 82214 times. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

From ‘A Softer World’

There is an argument made against privacy that says someone who isn’t engaged in criminal behavior has nothing to hide. This method of thinking allowed the US government to slowly sap away our civil liberties in the wake of the 9/11 attacks–many have just accepted that trading privacy for security is acceptable and used the “nothing to hide” argument to rationalize what was, essentially, a decision based on fear. However, limiting the government’s ability to intrude in our private lives is easy compared with attempting to control how personal information spreads on the internet via gossip. Rather than spies or wiretaps, gossip is often gathered by those we trust and spread online by people who don’t understand or appreciate the potential for the damage it can do. In reality, privacy is about much more than concealing wrongdoing.

Internet-based abuse (‘cyberbullying’) and privacy / relationship issues are still massively misunderstood. The complexities of online sociality are probably the biggest ‘generational divide’ between modern teens and adults. To help put it in perspective a bit, here are some numbers…

I HAVE A MYSPACE ACCOUNT!!1!