Designing for another dimension: the digital design manifesto
Throughout history, graphic designers have been creating beautiful visual systems and ideas with styles such as Art Deco, Art Nouveau, Rococo, Modernism, or Postmodernism just to name a few. With this, they made incredible posters, books, pamphlets, and other various forms of print media. However, today, we as designers are now designing for something completely different — the screen.
Sometimes designing for the digital space can be heavily misconstrued as an ambiguous translation of print to screen — as in taking a design style, like one of those aforementioned, and simply attempting to design within that particular system. In some senses this way can be successful aesthetically, though, any contemporary designer should know that current interface design is much more than this.
Current digital design, as we know it now, is called interactive design, and therein lies the principle difference. Print media is, of course, a tactile experience; it is something one can feel or touch. One cannot inherently feel digital design (unless they were to change what we mean by feel, in which case we would be talking about user empathy). Interactive and digital design is played with, touched. Once this realisation is able to occur, one can see how different our design is today. Graphic designers are now incredibly similar to the likes of Dieter Rams, Karim Rashid, or Marc Newson. These famous industrial designers were making things that have real world uses — things that people would interact with. Graphic designers today are starting to adopt this approach. However, instead of now making things with real world uses, we are now set within a new digital reality.
To explain this, let’s go into metaphors. It is easier to understand this idea if a digital interface is thought about as a completely separate dimension. In this dimension, the designer has complete creative control over what happens. The most common thing interacted with in this new dimension is a web page. At first, and currently still with most web pages, a web page is just that — a page. It is understood as a singular page with a simple layout. It contains hyperlinks that will take the user to separate webpages with similar layouts. The more one clicks, the more pages will flash up on screen out of these links. This exercise is an archaic way of handling design. The greatest webpages now are not simply a page. They are a canvas upon which many pages are put and manipulated. Each page within this canvas can be rotated, scaled, and moved with a sense of real gravity and friction — making the user feel as though they are interacting and changing another dimension under their screen.
A great analogy is thinking about pages of paper on a tabletop. The tabletop is the screen while the pages of paper are different elements. They could be a toolbar, a menu, a paragraph of text, really anything. Let’s think about how one would navigate this table top. Would they tap on some type and expect a page to simply appear before their very eyes? No. They would move the pages and grab the one they wanted. So in the designer’s mind they must think, “How do I let the user grab what they want when looking at this element?” The designer must change their thinking in order for a simple or even complex interaction to be completely and utterly intuitive. Every action should make sense through animation and motion.
The great thing about interactive design is that designers are not limited to paper on a table. Their digital paper can be changed in any way they want. So when solving the problem of getting from A to B, the designer can manipulate the space with nearly endless possibilities. For example, the tabletop doesn’t have to be restricted into a two dimensional flat surface. In the digital space, designers can extrude the area, and add depth in order to make the pages more understandable in terms of how they’ve been ordered. By clicking on an element, it could zoom into or out to the page, showing the user moving through this extruded three dimensional space.
These are the sort of things that cannot be done in print media. Design today is not the design that had lived for thousands of years before it. It seems, too, that digital design will only develop further in the future. What happens when the user is put into the three dimensional digital space through virtual and augmented reality? Can the designer still have web pages jarringly pop up out of the void? Current virtual reality designers have already understood that this is not an efficient way to use the technology. Now, it seems, the sentiment still needs to be spread to the web and digital designers of today. Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of fantastic sites out there to interact with, but we are far from the future where the net is monopolized with beautiful flowing interfaces. Interfaces are, regardless, getting better and better as more designers begin to understand. This is the likes of the iPhone X, Mac OS, and Material Design. Nevertheless, these systems are still imperfect. It is, and frankly always will be, up to the individual designer to make the correct choices, and when it comes to interactive design, these choices are becoming ever more complex.
Hey everyone. I wrote this as an assignment for Communications Design history back in the fall of 2017, and I really tried to take it above and beyond because I truly believe it, which is why I’m posting it now. In this little post section, I’d like to direct you to a couple of amazing readings that are very relevant to this manifesto. First, which I’ve just read after adding in the final pictures, is Why Do All Websites Look the Same. It really hammers home some points about current web design trends, especially with the idea of template design. Second, and I think this is integral for anyone who does digital design, is Apple’s talk on Designing Fluid Interfaces. It further explains a lot of what I’ve talked about in more depth, and it also happens to be super interesting.
As a final note: It is incredibly easy to get wrapped up in technical limitations and small details in digital design. Often I find us looking at current apps and trends and conforming because it works. I encourage you to push on from this and be a leader: It’s okay to be different. In a world of hundreds of the same apps and websites, it truly delights to find a completely different experience. Sometimes all it takes is to step back from the details and see just how much possibility lies at the tips of our fingers.
