While reading posts from the two BSGD classes I was excited that I was learning a lot about the learners in my classes. I discovered a rather common thread in the various posts also, one that shared a fear of learning web design, and yet interest and maybe even some excitement (my interpretation I’m sure!) that web design may become a part of one’s skill set as a graphic designer. I was also a bit puzzled that web design was assumed to be a very different discipline from graphic design, and I would like to address this issue.
I was listening to an NPR broadcast late last year which was an interview with a designer who was commissioned for a major project in Dallas. The interviewer asked the designer what design ideas he was bringing to the project that he could share with the audience. The designer stated that he had no idea what the design would be like, because he had not yet begun the process of interviewing the potential users and stakeholders. He never designs, without first knowing who he is designing for and what the context of the situation adds to the design conversation. In interactive design we label this “user-centered” design, for we do not design web sites to be pretty or stylish – but to communicate with the specific users of the site to be designed. The surprise was that the designer in the interview was Tom Mayne – an architect and one of the principals of Morphosis.
I have studied the universality of design – how the various and diverse design disciplines of architecture, industrial design, product design, interactive design, and graphic or visual design all share common features and that designers share a lot of the same skill-set. There is a concept called “universal design“, which is “an approach to the design of all products and environments to be as usable as possible by as many people as possible regardless of age, ability or situation”.
My interest and concern is that there seems to be value in the integral aspects of design – which I understand to be integrating the design domain to include aspects of all types of design which strengthens any design discipline. Each discipline has its uniqueness, and even its own identity perhaps, but is there not also significant value in the integral aspect of design – that we learn from all of the design disciplines in order to further strengthen our existence as a designer? What designer would disagree with Tom Mayne’s approach to building a museum? Is his approach that different from other types of design?
John Allsopp, a software engineer, web designer wrote that “the web is a new medium, although it has emerged from the medium of printing, whose skills, design language and conventions strongly influence it. Yet is often too shaped by that from which it sprang. ‘Killer Web Sites’ are usually those which tame the wildness of the web, constraining pages as if they were made of paper – Desktop Publishing for the Web. This conservatism is natural, ‘closely held beliefs are not easily released’, but it is time to move on, to embrace the web as its own medium. It’s time to throw out the rituals of the printed page, and to engage the medium of the web and its own nature. This is not to say that we should abandon the wisdom of hundreds of years of printing and thousands of years of writing. But we need to understand which of these lessons are appropriate for the web, and which mere rituals.” (A Dao of Web Design“)
What I am suggesting is that the dichotomy that some describe between web design and graphic design perhaps would be better versed from a vision of integral design where we discover the similarities of the design disciplines rather than focus on the differences. If we expend a little more energy discovering how it is that graphic designers can also be designers of web sites instead of what the differences are, we may discover a wonderful opportunity awaits, rather than a dreaded, often feared concept of what web design represents to our experience.
It is normal to have fear of that which we do not have experience. But we also have complimentary skills and abilities with which to bring confidence and apply to the relatively new medium of web design.
(admittedly spoken by an interactive designer)
Posted by Wayne 
