Style on the web, style in the real world.

Posted by Phil Renaud on July 31st, 2006.

Phil Renaud is a Canadian blog design and web design enthusiast, with a particular admiration for web standards and CSS innovation. Ruby on Rails, xhtml/css, ajax, and a whole lotta love.

http://philrenaud.com

Phil Renaud has posted 21 articles.

RSS Feed for fadtastic.net RSS Feed for Phil Renaud

Full Profile →

We’re all familiar with the notion of art immitates life, but do we take that tidbit of wisdom any further? Can we say that one variety of art immitates a wider variety of art?

I’m talking about designers’ own personal trends in terms of webdesign, as opposed to what their personal styles are in the offline world. It’s not as easy as matching a dog to his owner - it’s hard to know at once when looking at a person what their website must look like, and vice versa. My personal blog has plenty (too much) of glow and shine to it, but my home office is very subdued, and has oak furniture and earthtones galore.

My car has a leather interior, and my iPod has a leather carrying case, but I can’t bring myself to wear the leather blazer I own. I’m like a fundamentally confused vegetarian.

As much as I try to design sites to a grid, my bedroom layout shuns feng shui like it’s the plague.

So what does this say about my design influences? Does my art still immitate my life? How do I take into account all the aesthetic variances, if this is the case?

The long and the short of it, I believe, is that the web can no longer just be taken as an offshoot of the outside world.

Sure, advertisement banners for big companies will always have the same theme as their televised counterparts, watered down to a smaller frame and (heaven forbid) flash’d up. But I’m not sure this is reflective of the bigger picture.

I want to say that design on the web is not the kid sister of print design, and it’s not here to settle for a backseat to traditional media anymore. If web designers - and this should really be put to a case study, but for 3:00-AM-sake I’ll just speculate on it - if web designers are separating their stylistic identity on the web from their stylistic identity in the outside world, aren’t we prepared to say that webdesign as a medium has evolved into more than just a branch of design as a whole. There can be really excellent web designers and horrific print designers.

These things seem so much more like apples and oranges now than they did when the web was younger, I guess is what I’m getting at.

But that’s just me - what are your thoughts on the matter? Is webdesign just a branch of the overlooming design world? Or has it taken on its own distinct character unseen in the latter?

(also, sorry about the long absence. I’m back for good, again. Honest.)

Share This

( 5 so far )

Comments RSS Feed

Phil, an interesting read. You have provoked a few thoughts on my part -

My thoughts are that an artist is different to a designer. Artists depict the world that THEY want to see or the world that THEY DO see. A designer creates for a purpose, not just an expression. Lets be honest, a designer creates things to make him money or to make his clients money.

The point I am attempting to make is that it would be unhealthy for clients if we designed simply from our own personal perspective and opinion. Target audiences, marketing messages, images, content, design styles and logo’s, all make up the brand of a company. This need to be relevant to their consumers otherwise they will not make money. This goes for any company (or person) in any sector in my view.

Therefore even if we are talking of personal blogs, the design still needs to create an atmosphere of familiarity. If its a blog about hard rock you wouldn’t expect a pink and fluffy design. If your main blogging subject was Barbie dolls you wouldn’t want the design to be black and scratchy.

So no matter how you dress, or what cover you have on your ipod, to me, it doesn’t matter one bit. You need to drop your personal view on life and try to look at things from your target audiences perspective. I don’t think that art is the same as design but would agree that “design imitates life” - it has to otherwise we wouldn’t be able to help our clients sell things. This is my humble opinion and please don’t take it the wrong way!

Keep up the good work.

Matt Davies
July 31st, 2006
#

This is a tough one to call…

In part, I’d agree: design styles on the web are definitely taking-on a form all of their own, representing styles that the designer(s) themselves don’t incorporate elsewhere.

The differences in style between web design and print media are not as far removed as your article suggests though - layouts, typography and images used are very similar for both media types….

I don’t think a difference in style and design itself is what is exposed as much as the difference in skills and tools involved. That is why I agree with this particular sentiment: …’There can be really excellent web designers and horrific print designers’ but only because when was the last time you saw a Print Designer who was excellent with HTML and CSS, and in contrast, when was the last time you saw a Web Designer master the art of print design for similar reasons? That’s where the divide really shows up (and not so much in style/design itself)

Matt Robin
July 31st, 2006
#

There’s no doubt in my mind that web design has striked out on its own. It has its own vocabulary for things–watch a print designer’s eyes glaze if you use “line-height” instead of “leading”–and its own beliefs, such as sans-serif type being easier to read.

It also has this queer responsibility of needing to play well with other sites. Communication Arts needn’t concern itself with a reader’s jumping between its print articles and I.D.’s print articles. But their websites do; to an extent, web designer-created standards are in place to give users a consistent experience of the Internet, not just of individual sites. That’s a radically different missiont that certainly sets web design apart as its own field.

Andrew W
July 31st, 2006
#

good art communicates with its audience, on an esthetic experience level or an emotive responsive level.

Design or illustration can be that too, though the message needs to be clear and definitely not cryptic or two-fold!

Johan
July 31st, 2006
#

In a class I took, the teacher told us that you should try to stick to no more than three colors. In web design, for the most post, that is not reasonable.

I sure there are other print design rules that web design constantly breaks.

Brian
August 1st, 2006
#

↑ Jump up to the comment form

The above post has obviously kept you amused. Why not discover similar material:

The posts Joe Dizon on starting your web standards journey., Setting Yourself Apart As A Designer, Web 2.0, 3.0, 4.0…, About fadtastic.net, Is Glass still Class?, are related to this post.

Or why not take time out to find out about the author of the post.