By Adam De Lucia
Snapshots of Web sites displayed at Lowenfeld Hall on the 10th floor of the Axinn Library, exhibit the current state of art in web design.
Tom Klinkowstein, guest curator of the “New New Media: Recent Trends in Web Design” exhibit, summed up the criteria for the selection of these sites, designed by artists and business people who either specialize or find a hobby in Web design.
“The criteria were how sites differed from sites of the mid-1990s,” Klinkowstein said.
He enlisted a team of 10 fellow designers to select websites that “stood out” from the hundreds viewed. The team chose to exhibit sites based on consensus.
“The works were very impressive and the presentation was very clear,” Sherry Ferrer, a senior graphic design major who viewed sites, said. “The exhibit has variation.”
“There is a lot of self expression in Web design,” Nicole Barth, a peer teacher and senior graphic design major, said. “The range is the same as in other art forms.”
Klinkowstein placed the selected sites into three categories: “the hand-made arts and crafts look, the idealized corporate look and information design.”
The hand-made look evokes the impression the site was constructed from scissors, masking tape and glue, which counteracts the bias of the grid from which most Web sites are designed.
“It is opposite the nature of the media,” Barth said. “You don’t come across it a lot.”
Klinkowstein also mentioned a subcategory of the hand-made look, “the corporate hand-made look,” encapsulated by the Desperados’ website.
The pure corporate look is a slick nod towards 1960s graphics, he said. It features refined and detailed graphics with smooth edges and includes a lot of animation. Corporate sites currently on display include blur.com, joshuadavis.com and heavy.com.
The beauty of information design sites comes from the accomplishment of high functionality, he said.
“There is such a broad range of ways information can be displayed,” Barth said. Given enough time, University students could design sites like some of these on exhibit, she said.
“In our Web design courses you learn basic hierarchy,” she said. “All of these [sites] have simple navigation. Home and contact buttons, every site has that.”
According to an exhibit brochure, non-designers are interested in Web design too.
“When the ’97 Mars rover mission drew hundreds of millions of visitors to NASA’s site, people saw the Web could be a powerful, dramatic experience. They wondered why the sites they looked at every day weren’t more engaging, weren’t better designed,” Klinkowstein said.
“It creates a dialogue with other minds,” he said.
Klinkowstein explained some changes in Web design at the opening reception of the exhibit.
Designers understand the way the brain works and the eye moves, he said. They lay pages out from left to right. This is one standardized element of Web design.
Klinkowstein drew an analogy to car dashboards.
“You can get into a Porsche or Buick and still know how to drive either car,” he said. Web design has become standardized in this way. Designers have begun to respect the time of the person browsing their site.”