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I`m an artist with a blog about innovation, design, business and more.

I just wrote a few entries about web design giving some theories about
compositon, navigation and use of color. I also gave an extensive critique
of a very innovatively designed site about user experience. My comments
could be quite helpful in your quest for a great site.

The Websteader`s Almanac
or http://websteader.blogspot.com/

-Steve

Hi Steve :-)
I took a look at the UX Magazine site. For my point of view, I`ll run an example.

A while back, I was proofing a technical book. I chose to read it onscreen, in print, and to use text-reader software; all three methods, just to see what would happen.

What I noticed is that when we read, we have a pretty limited field of vision. We focus on about 5 inches worth of horizontal text, and maybe 1 line. However, we have a second field of vision that isn`t as blurred as peripheral images. That`s no wider, but it is higher.

I think it`s not so much a field of vision, but we jump our eyes around so quickly, we don`t notice. As such, we read ahead a little, and read back just to keep our place. However, we don`t attend to the words ahead or behind that narrow scope of what we`re reading moment by moment.

The result, is that although we "see" repeated words and phrases on a piece of paper, we don`t notice them. But change that to "listening" to a page, and those repetitions instantly jump into attention and become very annoying.

A Web site isn`t like a printed paper. Nor is it like listening to a story. Video monitors are wider and taller than any ordinary type of paper excepting a printed newspaper. I believe that a couple of hundred years of newspaper layouts has winnowed out what does and doesn`t work.

So...the UX Magazine site: I agree that it`s new and different. I understand the idea of the article stories lined up in boxes. But to me, it ended up looking like a spreadsheet or grid. It was hard on my eyes and brain to stay focused on a single box long enough to "want" to read it.

After all, if the visitor doesn`t want to pursue the information, it doesn`t matter how else it looks. The person just clicks away from the site.

There`s a reason newspapers use large headlines, generally run on a vertical plane, and work with sidebars. We can go back and work through the science behind it, but the layouts were developed without science. Trial-and-effect takes time, and newspapers had that time. I believe we can save a lot of time in Web design, by borrowing from all that past experience. That`s my perspective, at any rate. :-)

Craig...

You make some good and valid points. Of course our field of vision is
unable to take in an entire page (paper or web) of information at once.
As you state, this is to the advantage of the format of a large newspaper
page and the way they use headlines. It is a standard that works and has
proven itself for over a century.

However, I think we would agree that a website offers flexibility
unavailable to the printed page. Sites are viewed in different dimensions
far more varied than the tangibility of paper. Browser windows may be
small or on large widescreen displays, seen at arms length on a laptop or
viewed on a portable web gadget like the upcoming iPhone. Field of
vision takes on a new challenge. What works in the newspapers doesn`t
necessarily transfer to every website, though some aspects of papers
transfer well.

Design and layout must rise to the new challenges that come with getting
information online. And what is so exciting about the web is that it is
happening all of the time! UX Magazine has taken on that challenge in a
unique way. Sure it may not work for everyone. I don`t claim that their
format of panels is a universal answer.

For me, I love it and I appreciate it. I found it very easy to look at and
browse through. I can also accept that you found it unsatisfying. Your
comparisons to newspapers can only lead me to believe that you find
comfort in the format of your daily Times, Chronicle or Gazette of choice.
Nothing wrong with that! And many news websites pull it off
successfully. And many don`t.

You mention that we can save time in web design by borrowing from the
past experience of newspapers. But they aren`t the only source of printed
information. While newspapers generally stick to a tried and true
conventional design, magazines have been on the forefront of
information design for decades. UX borrows not from newspapers but
from magazine style layout. They even call themselves a magazine!
Kudos to them for borrowing from a source more fitting to their vision!

-Steve

P.S. For those of you interested in this tantalizing discussion, please visit
The Websteader`s Almanac to see the original post. Thanks!

Alright, now consider the number of people who explicitly complain about the breakup of continuity in magazines. Those magazines that place parts of a story on many different pages were trying to be like a Web site, before there was a concept of Web sites.

So too, help manuals would have loved to include the idea of hyperlinks, except they didn`t exist. Yet having ONLY online help references introduces its own set of problems.

I totally understand that Web sites themselves, as a global "unit" of information are 3D. A book isn`t the same in this context of three dimensional. I`d go with Layers, as in graphic programs, but not so many people understand the image.

What I`m saying about the UX Magazine site is that each "page" on the site is a fixed entity. It has borders (the monitor), size, and a layout. Within that page are connection points that go `downward,` so to speak. My interest is in the visual layout of each separate page, not the layout of the entire set of all pages on the site.

Lately, I`ve noticed the increasing use of the term "above the fold" when speaking of a landing page. Where did that come from, and why does anyone care? Because people are lazy, and don`t like to reach for the mouse to scroll a landing page. So too, people are lazy and don`t like to bend lots of pages in a newspaper.

There always are going to be people who want fast, moving, action, and glitz. Often, it`s the younger generation who want things always changing, like TV sound bytes. Fine....how much money do those people have to spend, and what percentage of the market do they account for? That`s a target market.

I wouldn`t say the UX magazine site fails....not in any way. What I`m saying is that "in general" (as in Web site analysis), I think there are certain global rules that work, and upsetting those rules should always be viewed as an `exception.`

This thread is about the underlying theory of Web design, and that`s what I`m examining. Consider the "discovery" of the Golden Ratio in art. It`s likely that none of the early artists sat down and mathematically programmed their paintings. However, over the centuries, people developed a consensus on what was pleasing to the eye.

Later, mathematicians analyzed the set of what was pleasing to the eye. Because of their skill with numbers, they found there was a repeating formula and ratio. I suspect there`s a similar ratio in graphic layout, although not being a layout artist, I don`t know about it.

What would be cool, would be have the formula, grid, ratio, or whatever, available for do-it-yourself Web site builders. Right? :-)

Very interesting conversation! Esoteric indeed.

CookieMonster... Thanks for the comment! And now to continue this
esoteric conversation.

Craig, you`re right, it would be great if there was some sort of
mathematical breakdown of website design to be used as a template of
sorts. However I would think the medium itself is too new for that to
develop just yet. And there are many varieties of websites from blogs to
e-commerce to communities of user-based content that perhaps several
formulas will eventually develop.

When and if this "golden e-ratio" comes along, would it even be used by
designers? Probably, but not everyone. As an artist, I take absolutely no
mathematical approach to my art, yet my knowledge of composition is
refined and comes naturally to me. Good composition is learned for sure
but I don`t know any artist or graphic designer that follows such design
formulas like the golden ratio or spiral.

Does this knowlegde and skill transfer digitally to the form of a website?
You bet! But as mentioned, the website is a 3D platform, and interactive
to boot! Principals of design are being pushed to fit this new and
evolving medium.

You mention that your interest lies in the visual layout of each page and
not in the entire set of pages as a whole. But a site (generally) is an entire
set! They relate to each other. One navigates through these pages and
design of an entire site must take this into consideration. Compositon,
theme, color, texture, iconography and more should be reflected in an
entire site. This is not to say that each individual page shouldn`t be given
due effort. They certainly should!

With my personal interest in boundry-pushing, standard-breaking,
innovative design, I will always celebrate those who do so! That is what
my critique of UX Magazine was about. It certainly is "an exception" as
you say.

And how trends in design affect all this is another interesting question.
Certainly a poster from the Art Deco 1920s is different than one of the
space-age influenced 1950s or of today! Technology and interactivity
aside, how is a website of the late 1990s visually different than today`s?
And how might it look in 2020?

Hmm...okay, I see two different concepts and you`re seeing one unified concept. I see layout as one thing, and navigation-integration as another. You`re apparently including the multi-tiered navigation as part of the "layout." Maybe it`s a confusion of the word.

Regardless of how many layers, and what sort of integration, one thing I believe we`d agree on is that whatever you`re looking at right now at this moment, that`s all you`re seeing. You can`t "see" the other pages (layers) at the same time as you`re viewing one page. Right? That`s why I look at only the layout of each page.

Sure, it`s important for there to be a visual theme to all the pages, taken as a set.

Also, I do want to make the point that probably no artists, even in the past, sat down and mathematically developed the Phi ratio so they could paint a picture. (Well, maybe Da Vinci...dunno.) However, by following their instincts, and what looked best to them, many of them "somehow" ended up with that ratio.

There`s a great study that led to computer-based cosmetic surgery software. In it, infants were shown many faces, then measured for their pleased or displeased responses. Adults were also shown the faces, but I was most fascinated by the little babies and their reactions.

"Beauty" turned out to be mostly dependent upon symmetry. That opened the door to grids on the human face, which of course led back to the same Golden Ratio. In other words, it isn`t that you start with the ratio, then create something artistic or beautiful. It`s that you create what you believe is beautiful, and lo and behold....it ends up following that ratio.

John Cage did his avante garde performance of silence, where he recorded audience ambient noise. Was that art? I don`t think so...really. It was intellectual art, but meant nothing emotionally. Cage was making an exception and calling it art based on only the attribute of being an exception.

So too, I don`t believe that a Web page is innovative only because it`s an exception to either a rule, or to what naturally flows and works. To me, regardless of how new and unusual is the Web medium, it still has to have meaning and be useful to some set of human minds. Since that`s a finite set, there`s a finite number of ways to create a meaningful page (or set of pages), in my opinion.

Don`t get me wrong; there are only 12 notes in an octave, and we haven`t yet run out of music. :-) But I do believe that certain traditional layouts work better than others. My argument is that whether on newspaper or a video monitor, typical layouts get across information faster than non-typical.

Maybe that`s my point...now that I`ve written all this---transfer of information from the source to the destination. In a Web site, the source is the site-owner. The destination is another human mind. The "target" destination varies, depending upon if the information is a sales request, generally informative article, or other topic.

Ergo, if engineers can say, "form follows function," I would argue that site developers could say, "design follows topic." And by "topic" I mean the "class" of information being sent out from the Web site. (In this case the class of information is what...`magazine`?)

That gets into information theory, and the concept of classifying or categorizing types of information. Yeah, yeah, I know of nobody who`s going to scientifically do this....but again, this is a theoretical (or maybe esoteric) discussion. :-)