Web Design: New Media - Old Mediocracy

Alex Baumgardt

Creating a solution for navigating a website would not seem to be a major challenge these days. Designers are surrounded by a variety of apparent "design standards", which promise to be as successful as the supposed leaders, the likes of yahoo, amazon, cnet or ebay - today's web designers simply need to shop around.

Just as the average web designer creates something from the "non-creation" of his or her colleagues, it seems that the client is also content with the solutions offered by the wealth of revered models. It is not unheard of for a designer to be confronted with a client's demands to produce a design concept, which is very similar to a solution that already exists.

The issue of quality of these quasi-solutions appears to play only a secondary role. The majority if designers submit to conventions, which they may not have created but which they are nonetheless happy to maintain.

The creatives appear to have no shortage of energy when it comes to presenting yet another incarnation of the old reliable "left-side-navigation" (as anglophile web designers like to call the organization of navigational elements on the left hand side of the screen), the obligatory tab system and of course the beveled button.

To understand this lack of direction prevailing in web design today, it may be helpful to look to the past. The origins of any new medium are dominated by engineers and technical people and the 'world wide web' is no exception. The need to evolve information designs seemed to be at best a secondary consideration. It was only when the 'World Wide Web' started to be exploited for commercial purposes that design became a necessity. Unfortunately the Internet revolution was preceded by another revolution, which sowed the seeds of the current design dilemma - the revolution of desktop publishing. By the mid-1980's, anyone who had a home computer and a printer was able to create a lay-out and publish documents, with the help of the appropriate software. This marked the start of the divorce of the design community from its tradition and its expertise. The availability of technology replaced the skill f information design - and reduced it to a superficial level.

Computers took over the skill component and people felt qualified to take over the artistic component! The early period of the web which was driven and determined by technical people and programmers soon gave way to the era of the zealous young web designers who no doubt went about their task with energy and innovation, influenced by an older generation of designers for whom knowledge of typography and sometimes even an understanding of elementary design principles seemed no longer to be of importance.

The body of expertise that has developed around the question of user-friendliness or navigation solutions appears to have sacrificed itself to an unusual philosophy of consensus. What other explanation could there be for the fact that usability experts such as Jacob Nielsen conclude that even though the design quality of 90% of the major websites is very low, they have to serve as the standard for designers. Such experts lay down what the user can expect because they assume the user wants every website to be navigable according to the same principles.

We can see that the user is not really trusted here. The Internet is the first medium in which the user moves in a highly dynamic and non-linear space. And adequate design for this includes the context of the user who is moving around in it.

Starting from the assumption that the user needs to navigate in order to arrive at a particular place, the solution offered should support this process and optimize it. Setting and maintaining the wrong standards means that the user is dictated to. The result is something that I call 'empty design'.

Thus by examining more precisely the dilemma of designing for the web, the greater dilemma of modern graphic design can be seen, which seems to have forgotten its original function - to find a solution for the best way to bring across content within a framework of implementation. Ignorance of and at times even disregard for the handiwork tradition and its original base in the craft of printing and design does nothing to strengthen the field of design. Instead, the field becomes vulnerable and open to attack, not least from the client.

When designers rediscover their power to solve communication problems (conceptual problems as well as those involved in the various aspects of implementation) then design will have a chance to be more than simply the half-hearted formatter of what is dictated by mediocrity and the Internet can develop its potential as a medium - for the user and for the designer.

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