[thelist] Are Web designers a dying breed?

[David Nicholls]

Erika Meyer wrote:
> 

> We need designers/artists/whatever to push limits just as we need
> usability experts to test and draw them.
> 

Amen to that.

I wonder an additional perspective on the Nielsen debate might be
through an analogy - the movie industry.

The movie industry is a little over 100 years old and is as mature as
any combination of art and technology gets to be - though still
evolving, in its mainstream aspects, it's not changing as dramatically
quickly as it did in its early days.  With the Web, we are still in the
era of dramatic change.

It seems to me Nielsen wants to freeze how things are done. But the Web
is not just about the presentation of text content like items on a menu
or instructions in a recipe book.

In the movie industry, there are many aspects recognised through award
structures such as the Oscars.  There are awards for cinematography,
script, special effects, sound track, musical score etc etc (leaving
aside the acting aspects, which don't have a direct web analog).

In Web Design, there are equivalent elements, all of which require skill
to implement well, that define the current state of the art as judged by
our peers.  Again, it is a mixture of art and technology.  And as the
technology develops, so does the art, just as it did in the movie
industry.

It's easy to compile a list of aspects of Web Design, each distinct from
the others, each of which contributes to the "Web experience" - graphic
design, page layout, navigation, colour schemes, typography, textual
information content, image content, site structure, accessibility,
technical competence and probably others.  (I'm not suggesting, BTW,
that we should create yet another Oscars process, only that the field of
Web Design is a rich one.)

And it is possible to do an excellent job in one aspect of Web Design,
while doing only moderately well in others.  The movie that wins the
best special effects Oscar isn't necessarily the one that wins the award
for the best script or best movie.  Suggesting that a web site that
fails in one aspect of design, fails in all, doesn't make sense.

If one looks at websites simply as a means of delivering a text message,
then one is limiting the field horribly.  Nielsen seems to be heading
that way.  Imagine if someone had proclaimed that making movies should
be limited to black and white silent movies made on fixed indoor sets,
because this was the right way to deliver the dramatic message, the
nearest movies could get to live theatre.  Obviously silly as seen from
a modern perspective a hundred years down the track.  Yes, there were
some really bad things done (and still being done) and many movie styles
that turned out to be dead ends.  We see history in terms of the
successful innovations, and often don't recognise that there were many
unsuccessful ideas that fell by the wayside.

My point:  if we, as practitioners of the art and technology of Web
Design, don't innovate and don't explore new ideas, and if we don't
allow ourselves, as part of this, to make unholy messes that fail
totally, we'll get nowhere. Prescribing how web pages should be designed
in absolute terms at this stage of the Web's development is arrant
nonsense and unhealthy authoritarianism.

Web designers aren't a dying breed, we're just getting in to our stride.

DN
-- 
____________________________________

David Nicholls
Nicholls Communications
nicholls at world.net
http://www.dcnicholls.com/
____________________________________