Que Multimedia, Part 3, Beyond Typography

Charles Field, Wednesday, May 30, 2007 @ 3:52 pm

As you might expect, I have a suggestion or two. Firstly, I would confirm my standing as a heretic by questioning the hegemony of typography. Put five designers in front of lattes and the one thing they will all agree on with mumbled nods is the importance of Typography. Of course I would too, but this reflexive assent masks a larger problem in how design is practiced and taught.

The design profession has been so deeply fractured in the last 15 years typography has remained one of the few common links between this new multiplicity of practitioners.

Well, for better or worse, the aesthetics of desktop and browser based applications use type in extremely limited ways that are an intersection between common system installed fonts and informative hierarchies. And common system fonts, consider Arial, Impact and Papyrus for a moment, leave much to be desired. However this is the palette of many desktop and browser based applications.

Often the more complex issues in these engagements are how to assemble, change and order vast amounts of information. Designers bring a vastly different focus to these activities than most developers. The developer concentrates on a micro level of specific code interactions to construct a working system while a user experience designer connects the user to a much more general picture. Factors that might be involved include business problems, a users cognitive interest/abilities and the the capabilities of the developers systems.

There are user research activity models, interface and task modeling considerations that have little to do with what anyone would describe as sophisticated print typography. Yet notions of hierarchy and the effect of symbols and composition are elemental to forming easily navigated tasks. So mere type skills will not be adequate; understanding interaction from a standpoint of task and capability is the core activity.

This means that the designer must have a comprehension of the basics of digital design history as well as what is current, and this is equally as trend driven as any part of print culture, in development terms.

I see this as the formation of the question, not an answer. What we do know is that the answer is a moving target, obfuscated by the claims of those who market digital culture. But the challenge to answer it is as real as any aspirations we have as providers of both sensible and innovative solutions.

user experience design

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