Design with Heart

Afternoon Keynote

@ Web Visions Day 1

I have only been to maybe three or four of the WebVisions conferences that Brad Smith and his team of organizers have put together over the past decade, but I have experienced enough of the events to know that they are a kind of annual examinations of the web media. It is multifaceted. The descriptive blurb on the conference website clearly states the scope of WebVisions when it describes itself as concerned with "the future of Web design, technology, user experience and business strategy." That's a full order for certain.

Today started out with a British academic guy, Luke Williams, who also works at the renowned firm Frog Design. talking about Dispruptive Design, which seemed like a super obvious view of the topic. For instance, he played the When They Were Kings interview with Norman Mailer where he talks about how Ali's psychological strategies changed the outcome of the Joe Frazier Zaire fight. I later saw an onstage interview with Williams and came away appreciating his passion of a teacher dedicated to getting folks to look at the world differently; an objective and avocation I share.

The closing keynote was by New York designer Agnieszka Gasparska. She talked about the derth of web pages now available and wondered about the role of design in a world with so much content. "Content is going to always engage people
but what is the role of the containers we create?" Beauty and emotion were words that came up often. Her design firm's motto is "Design with Heart" and the name of that firm is Kiss Me I'm Polish. (And, of course, national pride is one of the deepest of all passions.)

Her questions continued. "Can design be beautiful, can it create emotion?...Design is about communication, but can it be more?" A bit later in the speech she declared that user experience should be more about interaction and less about visual style and beauty. She declares balance as being the key to form not trumping function. Our attraction to good design is similar to our attraction to other people, we like to be around a balance of personality and looks. Good design has a similar balance between creativity and structure stressed Gasparska.

Gasparska believes strongly in bringing a "rich and visual playful creativity" to design work and showed how she tried to develop this sensibility in her work. She showed some of her early work for a firm called Funny Garbage back in the days of dot-com glory that was formative in this pursuit. A Flash web site for the band Fischerspooner, still accessible via Wayback Machine is an example of what she calls doing more with more. The band has a developed sense of style and a visual vocabulary of their own that she worked on translating to the web. She says her firm still follows the practice of working with clients in developing their visual identity, often in the form of a book of imagery.

Fischerspooner's site is the kind of job is a labor of love for a designer with strong artistic sensibilities, but she also showed work she had done for the likes of bloomberg.com that puts forth their individual need and message as well. Doing more with more is, I believe, Gasparska's way of classifying work that puts the designer under a more centralized and highly visual position.

Another category of design work she displayed was about doing more with less, finding the right container for the message for sites that are rich with content, but not stressing the designer so centrally. To this end, she showed three of her Kiss Me I'm Polish clients (is this the first design firm with the same name as a bumper sticker or teeshirt?) all of which were projects that lasted nine months or so. One was the coffee table type website for the Lincoln Center Jazz Hall of Fame. A pair of publication design make overs she was involved in, Thrillist, a men's online newsletter and Good Magazine also illustrated rich and well-executed design work that had been transformed through multiple iterations.

She also broached on a third category, doing less with less but it was less engaging and examples were less enticing. What she was getting at with less with less seems to be getting back to use of white space on clean typography to counter the most content littered of web presences. I was great to revisit last summer's Wired magazine extreme makeover of craigslist. At one point Gasparska riffed about the idea that the overstuffed architecture and content of site like craigslist might actually encourage interaction. McLuhanesque notions switch on in my brain over that one. It may be time aking the hot and cold media model to the web and mobile media to see how we interact in the 2010 global village.

In conferences like WebVisions, a discussion on the aesthetic aspects of the web seems like a good counter to the necessary emphasis that needs to be made on technical and commercial aspects of the field. Gasparska gave folks a few takeaways to consider and is simplistic as it seems, maybe her echo of that old Damned Yankees song should not be dismissed: "You Gotta Have Heart."