Seen, liked, disliked.
Collage: German Fernandez

Seen, liked, disliked.

When I saw the logo of the digital magazine The Verge and some of its pages, I really liked it all. Actually, I became jealous. At the time, I was assembling a website, and when I saw The Verge, mine was just a pale image.

Why my site was not like The Verge? It looked so cool.

I needed to see more of that redesign. I searched on social media here and there. I wanted to know more about the author(s) and their work, their reasoning, their vibes, their styles. Searching a little, I found an article with an explanation made by the editor of the magazine, who worked together with the creative team and certainly and probably, pushed for it among higher stakeholders.

What I also found was something else, something that startled me. As well as praised, the redesign was also heavily criticized for the very things that made me like it. Especially and above all, by experts in usability and accessibility. It is true that not all pages look their best within the design system, but it is true that others look really good. These two set of UX criteria -usability and accessibility- are very rigorous in their analysis and factor in their assessments metrics and tests that give them an assertive authority, which is something I really like about the UX/UI (User Experience/User Interaction) disciplines.

But unlike those analysis, I am not going to dissect or analyze the visual system of the magazine here. As you see, I was a little confused in liking what I liked, using criteria that I also liked. The praise and the criticism reflect different positions on design (of course, I am grossly simplifying here, but somehow this is a division that introspectively can be apparent to many practitioners of design at some point in their careers.)

From one point of view, design is seen as a machine, as a tool, as a means to a goal. As such, effectiveness is prioritized over disruption. The best design is the unseen design. This is an approach that looks like a kind of visual engineering, with a more objective foothold in the day-in day-out trade of the design profession. Because of this, I tend to favour this position when talking about the difference between arts and sciences, where design can act as a bridge between perception and logic in most cases, and of course, also when talking with clients (more on this later).

On the other hand, the other approach favours design as perceptual delight. This position is derisively labelled as using design as mere "eye candy". Seeing this redesign brought me joy that I couldn't feel for a long time. It flourishes in the visually poetic. Semiotic studies, focusing on the power of the meaning, can not always grasp this dimension of their objects of study, as probably do film studies, especially the ones focusing on the craft (angles, rhythm, light, colour, etc). The power of the perceptual image is so unfathomable that most texts can only circumvent it.

However, in return for this ungraspable quality, this position exposes design to a high degree of subjectivity, affecting its professionalism; because you cannot gatekeep taste, and especially the client's one: they may not like the colour, the size, maybe they liked it before but now they don't, etc.

That last consideration splits our concerns into two paths: what design is ( a reflection of what happens inside the discipline), and what we would want design to be and project (what really happens outside there). So we have two debates here, design as a discipline or field of study, and design as a profession, each one with its own dynamics.

We may say: what is design function after all? but we are not gonna answer that here. I said that I was confused, but also surprised because I got the feeling that I had seen something similar before. I had felt something similar before. Of course, since my admiration for David Carson's work of interrupted typographies and incomplete images clashed with the teachings we received in design school and later with what I learnt about UX and UI. To be fair, both in the case of The Verge and Carson's work in magazines were not, especially when they appeared, the favourites of many designers. Some writers, who like me liked the redesign, admitted however that it was not for everyone's taste and therefore, it was niche.

Although that conclusion seemed exactly that, a conclusion, somehow, the debate I mentioned above is also similar to one I saw at iEEVIS Berlin, in the chapter about Digital Humanities, one between sciences in one side and humanities and arts in the other. In that debate, I was surprised nobody mentioned design as a middle point between those two poles, although it was a conference on visualization. In some way, this was very similar to the Holmes/Tufte polemic in the 80s, well-known in the world of information graphics between a purism in graphics, an exercise in austerity and correlation and a bid for expression and impact. In general, positions in a wider debate of sorts between a utilitarian take and a poetic and sensorial (sensual?) one.

In design faculties, usually design in general is a broad spectrum of disciplines and the problems delineated above are the rationale of the way they divide specialities and courses. Theory and practice, craft and trend form the world of the new students every year. Before the profession relied on technique and craft. Designers' predecessors, artists, miniaturists, and illuminators, had a similar predicament. Much of the emphasis from artists in the Renaissance, from Leonardo to Durer, was an attempt to progress socially upwards dignifying their profession beyond manual labour, projecting it into an intellectual exercise and therefore an elevated aim.

These debates are taken in parallel, although ideally they should be done one after another, progressing from the definition of design to its means and then its place in wider contexts, but the real world, thankfully live and everchanging, doesn't work that way, which at the end means these debates might remain open for any foreseeable future.


#design #redesign #ux


References

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1) https://www.theverge.com/2022/9/13/23349876/the-verge-website-redesign-new-newsfeed-blogs-logo

2) https://www.adweek.com/media/the-verge-redesign-loyalty-readership-dwindles/

3) https://leonhitchens.com/the-verge-redesign-is-bad-but-is-growing-on-me/

4) https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/the-verge-redesign.2359080/

5) https://x.com/thesamparr/status/1569691837601914882

6) https://www.reddit.com/r/web_design/comments/xd85kf/verge_gets_a_redesign/?rdt=53546

7) https://vis4dh.dbvis.de/2018/

8) https://www.davidcarsondesign.com/

9) https://ellenlupton.com/

11) https://designishistory.com/1980/ray-gun/

12) https://eyeondesign.aiga.org/anti-grid-icon-david-carson-on-why-computers-make-you-lazy-and-indie-mag-design-needs-to-liven-up/

13) https://m3.material.io/styles/typography/overview

14) https://carbondesignsystem.com/

15) Read, Herbert. A civilization from under. In: To Hell with Culture and other essays on art and society, 1963. Routledge Classics, 2022. p 83. "After all, from a strictly economic point of view, there is no need to make things beautiful so long as they function satisfactorily. No; in the end we must abandon the economic arguments. We must use it for strategic purposes, but finally we shall have to confess that beauty is its own end; that we are fighting for a better design as part of a better world. In the end our argument is not economic, nor practical, nor even ethical; it is simply biological. We may have the conviction-certainly I have- that there is a final correspondence between what is efficient and what is beautiful and what is true"


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