All Your Skillsets Are Belong To Us?
Posted on September 18, 2007
Filed Under Graphic Design, Web Design |
I’m afraid I’m going to launch the site with a rant, hopefully not an incomprehensible one, on the way one sector appears to trying the most shameless appropriation of a term since IBM called their particular brand of personal computer a “PC”.
This particular bit of linguistic light-fingeredness is the way certain segments of the graphical design community (by no means all) equate the term “web design” with “graphic design on the web”. Shown at its most hardcore in site reviews all over the web that go no further than “You need a good logo” as if that was the Philospher’s Stone of web design.
This point of view is rampant in certain areas of the web. To take an example at random - The technologies you need to master to be a complete web designer . For the record, from the content of the linked site as a whole, I doubt that the author actually falls into the category I’m complaining about. This specific post however, potentially inadvertently, will confirm to many that they have all the relevant skills involved in web design. (If anything this post goes further than most such examples in actually including a little coding knowledge.)
To pinch a phrase from myself:
Design is the process of coming up with a solution to a problem that meets or balances all the inherent constraints of the problem.
Now what are the constraints of the problem of designing a website and how does “Graphic Design On The Web” meet or fail to meet each one?
Readabilitity / Viewability
Presumably you want visitors to your site to be able to view the site without having an epileptic fit (or, less severely, just an urgent desire to go somewhere, anywhere, else).
The vast majority of sites will also have text to be read. It would be nice if people were able to read it. The most obvious problems here stem from text being made too small - not everybody on the web is a graphic designer with a large monitor and 20/20 vision. There are other ways to ruin a site’s readability though - a bad font, too many fonts, poor colour contrast etc.
Does graphic design meet this constraint? I’d give this one a lightly qualified “yes”. The light qualification coming from that peculiar hard core that do not seem to properly understand all the nuances encompassed by graphic design, let alone web design
Accessibility
Poor readability may make a site difficult to use for some people. If you really want, though, to shut out entire segments of visitors then go for poor accessibility every time.
Does graphic design meet this constraint? A qualified “partly”. The readability mentioned above will have some impact on the accessibility as well - bad luck for the hard corers. There are other elements to accessibility though, for example anchor text and alt & title attributes, that does not fall within the purview of graphic design but should be considered by a web designer.
Search Engine Friendliness
Many websites would not survive without visitors driven to their site by search engines. That being the case, you would think that it would be important that, even if you don’t go for full blown search engine optimisation, a competent web designer should at least know how not to put obstacles in the way of the search engines.
Again I’ll say the graphic design “partly” meets this constraint in that there are techniques, that I would say fall within graphic design, that aid search engine friendliness e.g. sliding doors, image replacement etc. Again though the techniques that fall within graphic design are not sufficient on their own and a web designer, to my mind, should know about more technical matters as well, e.g. canonical redirects for which a little knowledge of the http protocol and server administration is needed in order to both understand and fix the problem.
Security
Oh-so-important, oh-so-dull and oh-so-difficult-to-fully-grasp-everything-you-need-to-grasp!
From keeping control of your own web server (and mail server) to, in the case of Web 2.0, keeping safe the personal details with which your visitors entrust you, security is absolutely, 100% important! Non-negotiable.
Does graphic design have anything to do with this? An emphatic “No”. It’s purely technical, dull, and it seems sometimes never ending, but it has to be done.
Content
Presumably, your website says something and this is usually done at least partly in text. (Unless you are a hard-core “graphic design on the web”er designing for other hard core “graphic design on the web”er!)
What can leave a visitor with a bad impression of your site here? Poor grammar, spelling, sentence structure, article/page structure, bad metaphors/similes/shadowing and any number of other techniques that fill up just as many books and web sites on writing as there are on graphic design. And that’s before we even get on to the question of how “effective” that writing is.
Again, graphic design gets a resounding “No” here.
I could continue here but I think this post is quite long enough and has sufficient examples to prove the point.
Lest it be misunderstood, I have nothing against graphic designers. It is easily the weakest part of my web design skill set and I admire those who are good at it. That is not sufficient, though, to convince me that it is all that is needed to be a “complete web designer”.
The defense rests.
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