Some months back, Sahadeva Hammari, the designer behind Rumplo and CollabFinder, had some interesting things to say about the state of design on the web:
Almost every novel I read makes me want to write, just as most cookbooks make me want to cook and many photography books inspire me to take photos. I have yet to come across any inspiring books on web design, though, and I suspect it’s because web designers don’t do as much pure design as the title implies. In other words, perhaps web design has failed to become an artistic medium and simply lacks the material to make an inspiring book.
Saha’s observation is spot on, although also not particularly surprising: flipping through your average web design text in search of creative inspiration is tantamount to consulting a manual on cursive penmanship in the hopes of becoming a more prolific poet.
So I wonder if web designers could become better designers if they emulated the Architect’s system of getting an engineer’s opinion only after his or her imagination has been inked on paper. That is, perhaps we should free ourselves from writing html and css as a profession. Such a strategy might have a better chance at reproducing the radical genius of Frank Lloyd Wright and Frank Gehry, if only because web designers could stop handicapping themselves with their fascination with code and the limitations code implies.
Here is where we begin to part ways. First, I think this isn’t an entirely accurate characterization of the architect’s process. In many (although certainly not all) cases the role of the architect is indistinguishable from that of a structural engineer, and in the case of a truly expert practitioner, even the most nascent of design considerations are never conceived in a bubble, but rather are deeply grounded in the material and fiscal realities of the project. The words of Frank Lloyd Wright himself speak to this: “Man built most nobly when limitations were at their greatest.”
And this is essentially the same philosophy which 37 Signals never tires of extolling: embrace constraints. Consequently, designers have little to gain from the wholesale removal of formal limitations, and as I’ve mentioned before, quite a bit to lose.
That said, I agree, web designers should be freed from writing html and css as a profession.
Here’s why: The strictures of CSS and the hurdles of cross-browser development are false constraints. They function not as guiding principles but rather superfluous abstractions, in effect distancing the designer from her work, not unlike the way Tufte’s “computer administrative debris” stands between the user and their attempts to absorb content or perform a task.
Objectively, CSS is no less foolish, finicky or inappropriate than laying out content with tables, and neither are far removed from insisting someone assemble a model airplane while wearing woolen mittens.
But the solution is not to be found in isolating the task of design from that of implementation. Good design is dynamically iterative, a constant cycle of learning, adjusting and evolving. As a result, the designer requires a tight feedback loop, such that she can readily perceive and react to the consequences of each of her decisions. CSS (like any abstraction) introduces lag into this system and hampers the design process. But handing the role of implementation off to another party will almost certainly reduce the efficiency of the designer’s feedback loop even more.
Ideally, web designers need a tool by which they can directly interact with and manipulate the content they are creating. Along these lines, the painfully talented Bret Victor began developing Substroke, a visual language “for drawing dynamic (data-dependent) pictures.” Unfortunately, the project was put on hold indefinitely, and there appears to be very little progress being made in this direction elsewhere on the web.
But sooner rather than later, these sorts of tools need to exist. And the bottom line is this:
Without a radical shift in the fundamental means by which we create for the web, the diversity and impact of our productivity will fall woefully short of its full potential.
