Since the web is defined as an informational medium, its direct rejection of the reader is the result of it being built upon the paradigm of behavioral interaction and not the narrative form. By focusing on the immediacy and efficiency of information delivery, the web seeks to service our digital ego—the user—at the cost of the aesthetic experience of the narrative. As a consequence, the web is full of sites that lack visually interesting design, have poor aesthetic usability and make banal use of typography. If the web’s raison d’etre is its functional usability at the forfeiture of the beautiful then why not forgo design completely and revert the web to its original state of web pages comprised of listed links. {1} Content is not defined by its medium—whether print or digital— it can only be contextualized by it, {2} nor do we stop being readers when we open a browser window. The narrative element of content does not disappear in its digital form only to reappear in print. The narrative—its ebb and flow—exists outside of the medium. This is why editorial design serves a purpose on the web as much as it does in print. Content is more than informational data with the written text being more than its residual artifact.
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When we look at a work of art or open a book we are captured by the nature of that object, whether it’s due to the paint, the sculpted marble, or the printed page. As a sensory experience, we respond to the tactile perceptivity of the surface. The thingness of the object declares itself. Reading text on a computer screen is without this real-world experience. Certainly we are cognizant of the computer or hand-held mobile device with which we are reading the text. But, the text itself lacks the reflective sensuality of ink on paper. The experience of reading becomes a metaphoric act — trompe l’œil for the modern digital age — made ever authentic through simulated illusion.
The absence of the broad use of editorial design on the web goes beyond a semantic misunderstanding: viewing content as the nature morte representation of an idea instead of its organic incarnation. As Khoi Vinh states: “What rules in digital publishing is not art direction and the craft of layout but, rather, design direction and the anticipatory technical dynamics of templating. Rare is the online publisher—or bedroom blogger even—who can find the resources to output content through any other method than ‘create once, use repeatedly’ templates. This is why an article from your favorite magazine looks far less graphically rich online than it does in print.” {3} It’s hard to argue with Mr. Vinh’s point; art directing a thoughtful article whether for a media site or blogsite is a huge commitment of time and energy. Which has pushed the presentation of content into two contrary directions: the horror vacui grid-based designs for most media sites; and the minimalist designs usually represented by the current trend towards the sparse tumblr account unadorned by design elements. In neither case is the reader well served, affronted by clutter by the former and left wanting for more by the latter.
When we read we have an expectation of the narrative whether we are reading a book or magazine, or webpage. We immerse ourselves into the text in order to lose ourselves to the story. Yet while reading online our attention is pulled away, distracted we lose focus.
Errol Morris, in an Opinionator essay from 2008, addressed the intentional discontinuity introduced by Luis Buñuel in his film, The Discrete Object of Desire, where the director had two actresses play the role of the female lead. {4} Whether Buñuel intended this ploy as a challenge to his audience—to sever their relationship with the subjective content of the film’s fictive element in order to force a self-conscious objectiveness—is unknown. {5} What it does highlight is our continued struggle to come to terms with our perception of reality; a fissured experience where reality and illusion conflict as we move from subjectivity to objectivity. In cinema, an example of unintended discontinuity is when the audience notices a error in the film edit when a character may be wearing a red dress, and in a cut-away the same character is shown wearing a blue dress. This removes the audience from the experience of the film narrative, detaches them from its contemporaneous moment, and makes each person self-aware of watching a film. The issue of discontinuity is not restricted to the film screen.
It is stated that there are no continuity errors in reality. Of course this is not true, since it is our expectation that reality is a linear narrative and therefore perceive it as such because our brain filters out these trivial visual aberrations—through the development of a cognitive system of seeing. One error, déjà vu, is defined as nothing more than a memory lapse. Think of your life as a strip of cinematic film and each moment a frame of that film; imagine your film strip gets stuck in the projector’s gate, and it stops—if only for a second—and that frame burns exposing the light of the projector’s bulb. For that moment you experience time in its true nonlinear state. This is déjà vu. But since we are incapable of cognitively perceiving this nonlinear present we perceive it as the recurrence of a past event—a remembrance. Here, the narrative form is used to bridge over a disruption in time. Our need for the narrative is so ingrained that it’s no surprise that most real-life continuity errors go unnoticed. A phenomenon referred to as Change Blindness or, more appropriately, Inattentional blindness.
Film stills from The Discrete Object of Desire starring Ángela Molina and Carole Bouquet as Conchita (The Criterion Collection).
The web is an extended continuity error on a massive scale. It is a hostile environment where real content (articles or essays) competes with illusory content (ads or redundant links) for the user’s attention, while poor design draws focus away from the primary act of reading. When we turn a page of a book we do so within the context of reading. When we click on a hyperlink we initiate a new action which takes us either to a newly rendered web page or to a completely new site. For the modern reader the act of reading is a cinematic experience. And the act of turning a page is the sequential montage of that experience. {6} On the web the act of reading is arrested and restarted as we are distracted by superfluous content and the errors of ineffective design. {7} Instead of the continuous flow of a narrative, the web disintegrates content into fragments. This fragmentation is the reason for the spareness of long-form writing on the web, and why some opine that the internet is killing storytelling. As Ben Macintyre states: “The narrative, whether oral or written, is a staple of every culture the world over. But stories demand time and concentration; the narrative does not simply transmit information, but invites the reader or listener to witness the unfolding of events.” {8}
The art object tries to resist the narrative through its enigmaticalness; while, the design object seeks it as its form of communicative mediation. Content is a language event that exists outside of its medium—whether web, book, or magazine. It’s contextualized by the semantic structure of the medium and made apparent by its design. The narrative is the means by which we understand it. To treat content as information to be dumped in pre-determined templates with no care towards its presentation is to undermine its meaning, make opaque its purpose and obscure its message. Content without structure or form is inert—making its meaningfulness still-born. Websites that display a disregard for the reader, force the web user into a push/pull struggle to retain attentive focus only to abandon them to a “permanent state of distractedness.” {9} This discordant method of content management and design is the reason Nicholas Carr calls the internet “an interruption system.” It’s an uphill battle for the web author that wants to accomodate her readers. Simplifying the structure of the site, removing gratuitous widgets and sidebars from the reading space, and muting the use of inline links, as Mr. Carr advocates, is a start. With editorial design being the coup de grâce.
Thoughtful design not only adds meaning to content and provides context to a web page, it also gives pleasure to reading. The structure of a web site should deliver to the user a meaningful experience and its design should provide the reader with a pleasurable experience.
Thankfully, for every trend there is a counter trend as there are several web authors who are experimenting with editorial design on the web. {10} This next wave of web authorship is an offer of proof that the reader can find a place online. It should be noted, though, that this experimentation is an echo of the past. According to the folklore of the early web, art direction was the way the first wave rolled their own sites—although it wasn’t called that then. {11} The current schema of design for these sites is to replicate the creative freedom usually found in magazine editorial design. It’s an act that is difficult to pull off since the web lacks what print has in terms of technical control over typography and layout. The oft-repeated—the web is not print—is based on two underlying arguments: that content is semantically different on the web than in print; and that web design should not emulate print design. The latter refers to the paper behind glass effects and 3D metaphors favored by some UI and web designers. Yes, the excessive use of these design elements, turning sites and applications into a pastiche of physical tangibility, should be avoided. {12}
Design on the web should not resist print’s historical influence from the editorial spread of the magazine to the typographical clarity of book design. Much in the same way that design in general should not resist being influenced by the other creative disciples, whether the arts, cinema or television. The act of reading text on a digital device is already once removed from the real thing. We accept that the use of design elements that evoke print—in its interaction—are a redundancy that when overused degrade design into kitsch. What we should not accept is the dismissal of the aesthetic experience of reading in its digital form nor its quarantine to an application on the iPad or iPhone. The web should not be left to the accountants of culture to be indexed, cataloged, data-mined, monetized and eventually filed in the Library of Congress. Certainly, there is room for the telling of a story. If web authors continue to reject the reader by foregoing the narrative and we allow ourselves to succumb to chaos, then our human story will be permanently scattered—the disjecti membra poetæ for which we will neither have the means nor ability to restore.
The Amazonian Mayoruna Indians in their attempt to flee the destruction of their world, went on a journey to the beginning of time. They hoped that by traveling counter-clockwise in a spiraled circle they would reverse time and reach the First Time of their ancestors, who they hoped would save them from the encroaching terror. The Incas, prescient that their age was coming to an end, sent their most privileged children high into the Andes mountains to pray to their Gods to stop time—in the hopes that the purity of their voices would make their prayers be heard most clearly by their ancestors in the heavens. As our own age comes to an end and our sun descends behind its shadowy curtain, to whom do we plead to stop time? We can only look to ourselves to salvage what remains of our story.
- 1. See Jakob Nielsen’s Useit site. There would be many in the design community that would disagree, and would argue that Jakob Nielsen’s site is well designed since it serves its purpose, no more no less. Fair enough, but if you take the de-aesthetization of content far enough it turns into antidesign. See, Joe Clark, The Extreme Google Brain, Fawny.blog (April 26, 2009). ↑
- 2. Which is a loose rephrasing of Marshall McLuhan’s “the medium is the message.” See Understanding Media: The Extension of Man, (MIT Press 1994). ↑
- 3. See, Khoi Vinh, “Jobs Saves,” Print (June 2010). ↑
- 4. “I suppose one could make too much of the fact that Buñuel used two different actresses for Conchita (Angela Molina and Carole Bouquet). But it feels central to the film. The reasons for Buñuel’s decision are unclear. Perhaps sheer perversity. As explained by his scriptwriter and longtime collaborator, Jean-Claude Carrière, Buñuel had toyed with the possibility of two actresses playing the same role, but then said, ‘LetÃs give it up…[It’s] stupid… a complete joke… the whim of a rainy day.’ A couple of days into production, Buñuel suddenly stopped shooting, called his producer, and insisted on going back to his original idea. According to Carrière, ‘Maybe he was secretly feeling that he needed two.’ Regardless of Buñuel’s real intentions, it gives the movie a strange, disjointed character, as if his ultimate intention was to trap the viewer in an extended continuity error. When I watched it recently, I already knew that there were two actresses, so I was hyper-aware of the differences between them. It had the effect of driving me crazy. I preferred one actress to the other, and so I kept waiting for the preferred actress to reappear.” Errol Morris, “Play It Again, Sam (Re-enactments, Part Two),” New York Times: Opinionator (10 April 2008). ↑
- 5. Buñuel, himself, offers a more practical explanation for the decision: “In 1977, in Madrid, when I was in despair after a tempestuous argument with an actress who’d brought the shooting of The Discrete Object of Desire to a halt, the producer, Serge Silberman, decided to abandon the film altogether. The considerable financial loss was depressing us both until one evening, when we were drowning our sorrows in a bar, I suddenly had the idea (after two dry martinis) of using two actresses in the same role, a tactic that had never been tried before. Although I made the suggestion as a joke, Silberman loved it, and the film was saved.” Luis Buñuel, My Last Sigh, (1983): 46–47. ↑
- 6. “A publication, whether a magazine, a book, a brochure, or even a tabloid is a cinematic object where turning of the pages is an integral part of the reading experience. A publication is simultaneously the static experience of a spread and the cinematic experience of a sequence of pages.” Massimo Vignelli, The Vignelli Canon, (2008): 84. ↑
- 7. It is important to note that some online users prefer to click a link to the next page of an article in lieu of scrolling down a page. I find this more as the result of adaptation—the choice of a lesser evil—than a willful preference. As always, web interaction is a subjective process and not all users behave consistently alike. So, I make these assertions with the caveat that I may be contradicted by the experience of others. See this discussion on flickr regarding columns in the New York Times iPad app. ↑
- 8. See, Ben Macintyre, “The internet is killing storytelling,” Times Online (5 November 2009). ↑
- 9. See, Nicholas Carr, The Shallows, (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., Inc., 2010), taken from an excerpt reprinted by NPR (2 June 2010). See also, Nicholas Carr, “Chaos Theory: The Web Shatters Focus, Rewires Brains,” Wired (24 May 2010). ↑
- 10. I won’t be able to list them all, but take a look at: Jason Santa Maria, Gregory Wood, PeepCode, Yaron Schoen, The Bold Italic and Tim Print. For a more comprehensive list, please check out the blog, Unique Article Design by Christian Mücke. ↑
- 11. See, Greg Storey, “Boxes.,” AirBag Industries/Archives (3 October 2006). ↑
- 12. See, Oliver Reichenstein, “Designing for iPad: Reality Check,” iA (12 April 2010). ↑