Friday, September 18, 2020

Make all visual distinctions as subtle as possible, but still clear and effective. (Edward Tufte)

 In my experience, unfortunately, I’ve seen designers mostly follow the first part of this, and not the second. Which does makes sense. I mean, what do you think is going to be taught in design school? 

In fact, I’d say it may be the thing that probably distinguishes designers most from non-designers. For the latter, art and design meant basically completing filling the page with many figures and colors, then bringing it home for mom to put on the refrigerator. For designers, though, I believe there comes – at some point – an appreciation of the whole, of white space, of not trying to just fill the hole, of letting things speak for themselves, of having a little go a long way, of taking things away rather than just keep adding them in.

I often wonder, though, how well that really translates from design school to industry. Now, if you happen to get lucky and go work for some place like OXO, or an agency, or some cool boutique shop in Manhattan or LA, you’re probably golden. But what if you end up at a bank, or an insurance company, or retail, or telecom, or government, or the military? 

My guess, in that situation, is that your definition of what’s clear and effective might be different than your company and the people you have to work with, at least at first. So, what you see as their adding clutter might actually not be that bad – and might help the user actually understand what it is they’re looking at (you know, affordances).

Take, for example, how drop-downs are signaled. The classic design is a box with an upside-down, filled-in black triangle, at the end of a boxed-in field. So, how can we make that more subtle? Is there something we can take away here? I think the box’s a pretty good candidate. And you probably don’t need to have that triangle filled in. Could you make it just a simple v though? How light can you make the lines? And how large does whatever it’s going to be have to be anyway?

There are plenty of other examples out there. I could go on and on.

Probably the worst I’ve seen, though, is being so subtle that there’s no actual design element whatsoever! Believe me, I see it everywhere these days – menus, scroll bars, table column controls, and other elements that don’t appear until you put your cursor over them. 

I think even Tufte would have to draw the line there.



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