Timoni West is a web designer in San Francisco.
This is her blog.

On the confusion between creation and instinct

I have been reading Designing Visual Interfaces: Communication Oriented Techniques for the last few days and have been charmed by the UI examples (cira 1995, or earlier), and the authors’ assertions about the uselessness of of “simulated brushed aluminum buttons” and “gratuitous dimensionality” in interface design. I’ve also found the book to be incredibly useful in detailing what later books take to be common knowledge about the graphic aspects of user interface design. Their positive attitude about how proper design techniques can be learned is reassuring, too, especially when it comes to basic things most would consider innate talent: “With practice, your eye will become trained to recognize exactly how much space is needed to achieve the proper balance between figure and ground,” and so on. Well, hooray!

From the cover

On page 89, they remark on purposefully organizing information, and why:

Organized structure does not occur naturally in man-made artifacts, so it must be consciously induced by establishing relationships among the components of the design. Effective use of structure allows individual elements to work in concert without being diminished in their own right.

But this lack of faith in humanity’s ability to organize is followed with:

The eye craves structure and will seek to impose its own organization onto a design whose structure is not readily apparent. This breakdown threatens communication, since the designer is no longer in control of the message.

So the immediate question is: why does your eye (or mine, or anybody’s) want to impose structure on visual elements it can’t naturally organize? Is the problem at the end, when there are too many paths and variables, and people can’t remember how they decided to organize things? Categorization via tags is a nice solution, allowing a significant number of paths to be recorded very quickly and retrieved just as quickly. Nonetheless the dichotomy between organizing information and imposing organization itself is curious. It’s clear that people want data to be organized, to the point of overwriting whatever faint attempts at aesthetics the light-handed designer might attempt. This is considered bad design, obviously: making the viewer work too hard only leads to confusion. Good design strives towards absolute clarity (attractive absolute clarity, really, because not everybody likes International Typographic design as much as designers do), but oddly there are already standard rules and regulations of good design, things that can be written down like a list:

• Take care with the mixing of typefaces
• Obey thee the rules of hierarchy when organizing important bits
• A pica in the middle means a pica all around

And so on, but somehow these are ignored or otherwise not apparent when it comes time for the untutored to fire up Word and make a flyer. It’s clear from the prevalence of bad music, bad art and bad film in this world that just because people want things to be a certain way doesn’t mean they can sit down and make them that way. Nonetheless when people listen to bad music or look at bad art, they’re only disgruntled. With design, people try their best; they look, they look again, they’re irritated, they use rulers or eyeglasses or their fingers as markers; they write things down a different way, and reorganize information until it makes sense to them. People instinctively want to organize their data in simple and practical ways. If the basic rules of design are the answer, and so clear they can be summarized in a page or two, why do they need to be written down at all? Why aren’t they instinctual during the creative phase?

—Timoni