Every design has a story. A website design has grids, fonts and colors, but how is it telling the story?
Jason Santa Maria took the time recently to re-evaluate his website and how he portrays the story he’s trying to tell. Read more about his journey on his site and see below for a quick review of his session titled, Storytelling by Design.
While the content of a design is vital, graphic resonance is what tells the story. The designer is the narrator. Jason talked about design transitioning from a magazine to the Web and how all of its graphic resonance gets stripped. You can open a magazine and find a beautiful spread, the marriage of graphic and type. You lose that storytelling when it’s brought to the Internet.
“Design can’t not communicate.” ? David Carson, Helvetica
He went on to show a lot of logos on one slide that each incorporate a bubble talk icon that looks “bubble-y” and then websites that have similar layouts. He then asked: “Why are we plagued by sameness?“, “We’re all capable of telling a story” and “Should we just design harder?”
Jason also touched on a theory that I have truly believed in: “We need constraints to challenge us.” With this in mind, the next set of slides went over theories about The Nature of the Medium that included four sections. Here I’ll break them down to their simplest explanation:
- The metaphorical page: Not starting the conventional way, with a blank white page. It has now transferred to screen/Web.
- Ubiquity & WSIWG: You are not limited by length or width (like a newspaper is) and size and content can vary depending on environment ? medium is fluid and can change and shift at will.
- Collections of pages: While a book has X number of pages, a website has unlimited pages. Often the amount of information isn’t easily determined.
- Layout: Golden ratio and/or the rule of thirds no longer apply. We are dealing with a single fixed dimension ? “Most of the Web runs on a single fixed dimension, width.“
A few examples to explain how sites have been more creative with these “restraints” in mind:
- No One Belongs Here More Than You - click pink arrows bottom right to navigate through site.
- Fray - used to tell stories online but now is in print. Be sure to visit the old site here; look around and read stories like “The Worm Within”.
- A Brief Message - scroll through previous stories to understand the graphical resonance.
- The Principles of Beautiful Web Design - roll over menu links.
- We Tell Stories - reading like you’ve never read before. Be sure to check out “The 21 Steps”.
To finish, Jason touched on how web design today has been driven by technology rather than message. Using a photograph of a Model T, he illustrates that we have all the hard things worked out but are sites all looking like Model Ts?
“The form of design should be driven by the story.” ? Jason Santa Maria
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