Design Tower of Babel

Most of my design work has been for newspapers, although I have done corporate logo and identity projects, magazines, newsletters and web sites. Even though I was an early adopter of the web -- had my first site up in 1994 -- I sort of fell away from all web creation software improvements and the discussions about how to design for the web. I wrote an article on web vs. print design for O'Reilly's Web Review in 1995 and was invited to a panel discussion on design the next year at the WWW Symposium in Paris.

But since then I have only barely kept up, focusing instead on ink-on-crushed-dead-trees design. I wasn't a neo-Luddite or anything. My interests and job just shifted. Lately, however, I have begun looking into web design some more as my professing is slowly shifting away from research back to design classes. I am appalled that the online design field is just as much an argumentative Tower of Babel as the print field has been.

Those of us in newspaper design can't decide on pull quote vs. pullout vs. quote out or readout head vs. second deck head vs. nut graf vs. explainer, and so on.

So, as I have tried to rejoin the field online, my reading has crossed arguments about user experience (UX) vs. usability vs. information architecture vs. interaction design, and so on. And is it a quality or a discipline? People are getting angry about all this, my friends. They also talk about how new usability is.

Granted I am not only a design "silverback" -- hell, when I first started working at a newspaper, headlines were still set by hand, letter by letter, basically the way Gutenberg did -- but mostly a mere professor of design, i.e., not a real designer. Nonetheless, I think good design has always been about the reader (geez I hate "user") in the same way that architecture is really about people, not glass, cement and steel. Focus on the users, er, uh, readers may be more important now, because they have so many choices and all those choices are businesses with shareholders who want dividends and don't care a whit about design or users or readers. But that's marketing and for another day.

Bottom line is that little of the current activity surrounding the message receiver is truly new and the internecine feuds between AI, UE, ID, UX, blah blah blah are almost embarassing to read. I get the feeling, however, that getting everyone to sit around a table, talk it out and stop squabbling is (as Darwin, or maybe it was Mr. Bean, once said) as futile as a blind man in a dark room searching for a black cat that isn't there.

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