The Web Smart Blog
The Web Smart Blog exists to extend the information provided in our monthly Web Smart Newsletters. Web information changes so quickly that a monthly publication can't cover enough ground. Also, additional information to past topics can't wait for future publication so we add related newsletter information here.
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Case in Point: Creative Flash Preloaders
March 13, 2008 at 1:51 pm by Eric
[Note: to be read with a tone of bitter irony] In my post How to Know if You're a Super Bowl Web Designer I railed against the absurdity of splash pages and Flash preloaders.Flash websites are extremely creative and visually compelling. The creativity exudes, overflows, and even spills over into the preloaders. Smashing Magazine put together a wonderful gallery of Flash preloaders for all us designers to gawk at. As long as designers are putting in all the effort to create amazing dynamic Flash sites they might as well stun us with brilliant preloaders too. Their clients paid them a ton of money to build them so we might as well enjoy. It's a good thing they spent all this effort, boy if they failed to capture my attention with such clever and entertaining preloaders I may not have ever stopped by their website in the first place. And while I hate waiting for a website to load (aren't all websites supposed to be fast loading, or is that just a suggestion for boring websites?) I'm glad they at least were considerate enough to keep me entertained while I wait. Please designers, will you ever realize that your client's website is not about entertainment but about their content? Just give me the information as fast and easy as possible, then go design a movie poster or something to placate your pent up creative urges. |
Tags: flash design agencies advertising advertising20
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How to Know if You're a Super Bowl Web Designer
February 1, 2008 at 4:20 pm by EricGood Web Design is Boring  This weekend is the super bowl of advertising. This week the ad magazines and blogs are all about which super bowl ads will come out on top. I'll be watching and enjoying the Pats The super bowl ads represent the best of the best in traditional advertising. The best creatives from the best agencies will present their best work. All eyes will be on these spots. And next week all the ad rags will be discuss which ads came away with the Lombardy trophy of advertising. For a super bowl ad to be successful it has to be extremely funny or exceptionally poignant. Master ad craftsmen will demonstrate all their creativity, vision, humor, and skill. They'll make us laugh, or cry. They'll pull out all the stops to surprise us, impress us, and hold our attention. They're ads will be different, unusual, and memorable. A super bowl ad is the dream of every creative in the ad biz--but not many will ever get such an opportunity. Yet, every aspiring art director and copywriter hopes that one day, they too will produce a super bowl ad. In the mean time, they have other opportunities to do creative, impactful work. After all, there are millions of television, print, outdoor and interactive ads to be concepted, and while they won't all run during the super bowl, they still have to do the same work. In fact, super bowl ads have it easy. Most people want to see the super bowl ads. No so the average prime time television ad. They have to be even more creative to capture the attention of people who'd rather skip them. Art directors and copywriters live the high competition ad game every day. They bring their impressive creative vision, innovation, and ability to surprise to everything they do. That's why they tend to be crappy web designers. If you apply a super bowl oriented ad mind to the web, you get Flash-based, creative, visually-compelling, unique, original, dysfunctional, un-navigable, shallow, and convoluted websites. Here's a litmus test to see if you're a super bowl designer that builds dysfunctional websites--have you ever spent time designing a really cool "loading" graphic for a Flash website? If you have, you're a dysfunctional super bowl web designer. The Web is Not Like the Super Bowl Websites are fundamentally different than advertisements. Traditional ads must gain attention before any other message, or call to action can take place. They need super bowl advertisers to get this attention, and advertising agencies do this brilliantly. But nobody's attention needs to be arrested by a website. Nobody sees websites during their television shows. Nobody flips past a website when they read a magazine. Nobody drives by a website on the side of the road. They visit websites. They type a URL, perform a search, or click a link. The attention is already there. The only thing a website needs to do is not lose it. That's where a super bowl mentality actually hurts more than it helps. Once I arrive at a website my expectation is to quickly digest my options and find the content I'm interested in. If the website gets the way, with a fancy splash page for example, it hurts more than it helps. When I visit a website it has my attention, now must deliver what I'm after as quickly as possible. Everyone web designer agrees that the most important web design qualities are intuitiveness, easy navigation, and speed. But let's think about the consequences of following these principles. Intuitive: To be intuitive means that people understand it without having to think about it. Something's intuitive when it's the same as what they've seen many times. Intuitive is obvious; it needs no explanation. Ideally, things that are intuitive are not even noticed. Easy to navigate: To be easy means to be familiar, typical, common, simple and follow conventions. Fast: Fast requires restraint in the use of graphics, simple layouts, and defaulting to text whenever possible. Look at the kinds of words that define an intuitive, easy, fast website; understandable, same, obvious, un-noticed, familiar, typical, common, simple, conventional, restraint. Now ask yourself if a super bowl creative is motivated to design a common, obvious, simple, familiar website? Never! Such words are anathema to art directors. They require the exact opposite of art director impulses. Let's consider these design impulses when it comes to a website navigation bar. A navigation bar should be normal, usual, common, familiar, fast, intuitive, and simple. It should be in a normal position, use common labels and perform in an expected manner. Boring. Let's let our super bowl designer at it. His nav bar will be different, creative, unusual, interesting, and surprising. Time to whip out Flash and build a nav bar no one has ever seen before. His will use icons and images instead of words. It will move the screen around, bringing areas in and out of focus. It will use symbols and metaphors. Oh, and there will be surprises--dynamic roll overs that entertain and on-click animations that impress. Of course to load all this functionality will take some time, so it will need a loading status bar--better come up with a creative idea for that too! These creative impulses do not serve the website. Let's face it, nav bars should be boring. The more boring the better. So boring that users don't even think about the nav bar, they just use it. Web design is not really boring, I'm just making a point. It's actually a fascinating, interesting and challenging profession. But it is definitely not an opportunity for show boating. Great web designers show restraint. They serve the website and the visitor, not their creative impulses. Knowing when to be creative and when to be boring is the temperament common to the best web designers. Websites are not made for the super bowl, and super bowl designers need to check their unrestrained creativity at the door when they design for the web. Clients need to to show restraint, too. Everyone loves to have the ad that won over the super bowl viewers and received critical acclaim. But websites are for customers and clients, not award shows. While the super bowl is exciting; the web should be much more boring. |
Tags: design advertising advertising20 webdesign
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Copywriting on the Web from A List Apart
July 31, 2007 at 4:05 pm by Eric| Two excellent articles on A List Apart about copywriting on the web. These articles are helpful related resources to our two newsletters, Word's Make the Web Work and Unleashing the Power of Words. Bronwyn Jones' article Better Writing Through Design highlights the irony of designers investing tons of energy designing every last detail of a site's structure and interface, but then leave the whole reason all that is important--to serve the content itself--to be filled in at the end. Bronwyn encourages every website owner to work with a copywriter from the get go, but if that's not possible he offers great suggestions for doing the heavy lifting of copywriting yourself. He has suggests avoiding hyped-up marketing language and finding a voice that fits the site and speaks to the audience. Amber Simmons wrote a great article called Reviving Anorexic Web Writing. Amber rightly argues that the common belief that nobody reads long web copy is a fallacy. The problem isn't long web copy, it's bad, anorexic web copy. She urges us to write well, to invest time in our language. She also makes a great point of paying more attention to image ALT tags. |
Tags: design process copywriting
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How Not to Display Your Artwork on the Web
June 6, 2007 at 10:00 am by Eric| Charlie Parker over at the Lines and Colors blog (an excellent illustration blog) posted an excellent critique of designer websites. Among his observations are the use of pop ups, resizing browser windows, over reaching conceptual layouts, search engine problems and many more. This is an excellent post to go along with our Web Smart newsletter Advertising Agency and Artist Websites. I've been marketing again lately, sending emails and letters and making follow-up calls to advertising agencies and design firms. Part of my process, of course, is to review these agencies sites before sending my stuff. As a result I am daily reminded of these horrible tendencies in designer's websites. Agency sites frequently hijack my browser maximizing the screen and make me download massive Flash splash pages. Please, for the love of Pete, if you are a designer or agency guilty of these practices--STOP. Read this post, read our newsletter, and if you need ideas of what you should be doing with your website (if not impressing the world with your powerful interactive and creative concepts) request our article (use our contact form) written for David Baker's Persuading about how advertising agencies should be using their websites or download the How Magazine article (5.1MB) we contributed to on the same topic. read more... |
Tags: design process
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