txt

David Eggers on content versus form:

Almost all design is bad, and on the web, that percentage of terribleness rises considerably. Because the medium is inherently cheap-looking, there’s almost no way to dignify it. So at McSweeney’s, we just put the words up. It takes our web guy, Kevin Shay, about two minutes.

There are a few content sites one could name that have a good deal of money behind them, but which no one reads because of their labyrinthine link structures and slow-loading graphics. All that effort in vain. What very few designers realize, particularly the younger ones, is that most people would rather read something — actually read the words — than look at all of their lines and arrows and silly pictures they’ve screened back.

More often than not, the designer’s efforts are getting in the way. Worse, the editors above them, who should be protecting the text from such pollution, are eternally cowed into thinking that design is complicated and magical, far beyond their earthly knowledge, and thus they allow the words to be mangled and obscured.

When the words finally reach the reader, the designer has, as often as not, rendered them almost unreadable, and so a reader moves on. But we’ve always felt that the words don’t need a whole lot of help — that a piece about searching for tigers in Ireland is not necessarily needing of a picture of tigers or of Ireland, much less blinking or screened-back ones. The words are enough, if the words are good.

Filed under: research by adrian | Tags: content, design, minimalism, simplicity |