Ok, this is a bit of a departure from design, but is loosely related. I went and saw the third X-Men movie last night and was terribly disappointed. In a discussion with my wife, I realized that what upset me was not only the poorly written story, but the overt sentimentality of it. She did not really know what I meant and I wasn’t sure how to explain.

I have given it some thought, and I now know what I mean, which is this: The movie relies on the viewer to bring his or her positive sentiments about the characters to the film. If someone had written that script without using any characters known from any other story it would never have been made into a movie. The situation is further worsened by the fact that the characters were not particularly true to themselves, as they had developed through the previous two movies (I won’t even compare them to the ones in the comic books).

Art demands truth. And some sort of revelation through truth. Sentimentality comes about because of laziness, and because it is genuinely difficult to be truthful. It doesn’t really matter if it is a movie like X-Men 3, or a cheesy painting of a lighthouse, or some fluffy music. If the work requires the viewer to bring his or her happy sentiments about the subject for the thing to have any value at all, then it is sentimental.

Sentimentality is less of an issue in design, I think because design is generally focused on accomplishing something specific, such as communicating a particular idea. There is no room for sentimentality.

I went today to the new Ikea store in West Sacramento. Ikea is the ultimate design store – even more than the very elegant Apple stores. It is no wonder that people are so drawn to it. The furniture is inexpensive, modern, and clean lined. You don’t get that big bulky look from it and it is designed to make an efficient use of space.

That is not to say there is nothing to complain about Ikea furniture – it is not all of the greatest quality, and styling is pretty limited. But the in store experience is just phenomenal. They put arrows on the floor to guide you through the store and you see their products on display in dozens of different ways. You see combinations of wooden tables, fabric covered sofas, rugs, lighting, appliances – everything. They put together whole living spaces, including kitchens and bathrooms, that sport their space saving efficiency beautifully. Some pieces are just so ingenious and creative, you can’t but help admire them. The rocking chair on the left is one example. Don’t know if I would want one in my house, but it is way cool anyway.

Their web site is not nearly as fun as their store, but you can get a sense of their products if there is no store near you.

I believe this will be a reccuring topic on this site, as it is at the core of what the site is about. So why not sink our teeth in. In a recent coversation with a friend and fellow designer we discussed the kind of work we are seening from other designers. There is of course tons of bad design. We all know that. We all see it every day. There is lots of stuff that is OK, and there is stuff that is supurb.

A lot of stuff that I see coming from young designers fresh out of school is very flashy, very slick and really cool. But is it supurb design? Some of it is, and some of it is not. I would not put much in the “bad design” category. These students have worked hard, and they have learned a lot.

However, it does seem to me that a lot of it is trying too hard to be “cool” at the expense of the design’s purpose or intent. To me, in design, form follows function. Great design is 99% about performing a function adequately. Get the idea across, get out of the way. Sometimes this is done best with type, sometimes an image works faster. Sometimes a combination of the two is most effective.

Here is an example:

This image is from Craig Frazier Studio. The website is filled with excellent design and can be found here: Craig Frazier Studio. In this example you get imediately what the poster is about from the visual. There is nothing confusing to stand in the way. There is a very clear message.

It is important to me, as a designer to keep the perspective of purpose at the forefront of my mind when designing. At the end of the day, I want my client to be happy with the result. I want the work to be effective. How it rates among other designers is important to me too, but less important.

I met up with some people last Friday who are designers in the area. It was really great to connect with people who are doing design work. It makes you really aware of how diverse the field is, with people who specialize or have particular talents for all kinds of things. I am discussing the possibility of creating a collaborative with one member.

This is an idea I have been thinking about and have discussed with a number of people, and I think it is a really great idea. Perhaps not a new idea, but now, as so many people have high speed Internet connections in their homes and want to have control over their schedules and work-flows, it makes more sense than ever. My hope is that this could lead to a situation where work can come in to a central location then get distributed out to one or more participating collaborators.

This all seems like a fairly obvious idea to me, but I have not found good examples of this in practice, except perhaps in the Architectural/Design industry. Does anyone know if this is happening in the Graphic/Web/Interface design industries?

Ok, when I learned how to make web pages, I learned HTML. There was a lot you could do with HTML. I learned that if you want to put anything in a specific place on the page, you use tables. Table can nest and you can set them to specific sizes, giving you a fair amount of control over the design of your page. However, there were lots of things HTML could not do, such as really specify the size of text on a user’s screen. That was ultimately decided by the user’s browser. This is infuriating for a designer. If you can not control how something as simple as text is going to look, then design is haphazard at best.

You could control things by making images of stuff and then slicing them up. This seemed like a viable workaround for a while, but it is bandwidth heavy, difficult and awkward to update or change, and useless for bodies of text.

Then came the magical CSS. Wonder of wonders, you could actually sepcify line height! I had always hated that “single spaced” look of text on the web. Not enough white space! Not enough breathing room for text. It was rather ugly in any browser on any system. I sat down to do the tutorial on CSS sometime in 2000 and what I found is that because of the browser wars between then Netscape and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, there were more exceptions than rules being followed. Crestfallen, I went back to my nested tables and continued to work around HTML.

Now, however, CSS has come a long way. Browsers have come a long way. Internet Explorer still stubbornly resists following standards, but it follows them a lot more now than it used to. Now CSS is really the way to go in web design. Anyone relying heavily on tables still is not a real designer. There is little need to bend and twist HTML into web sites that are difficult to update and contain a lot of superfluous code. This web site is designed with CSS as are any others that I am designing now. I am still learning how to master it, but it is not too hard, really. Not any worse than beating tables into submission. For a really good demonstration of how CSS can transform a page, check out this live design and also CSS Zen Garden

Greasyfur Unlimited has been my digital playground for almost ten years. It has been through many different designs, but I remember the first time I designed it, I thought the web offered amazing opportunities. I remember wanting it to be more than just a list of stuff, which is what most web sites were back in those days. Everyone was making “hit lists” of their favorite sites and a lot of the World Wide Web was going from one hit list to another. Boy things have changed. Technology has come a long way; users have come a long way; the ecconomics of the WWW have come a long way. But I still want Greasyfur to be a special place. My hope for that site has not changed. It is a place to see things you don’t see on other sites. Some of it is personal, some of it is weird, some of it is fun, some of it is goofy, and all of it is unique. At least that is the idea.

Over the years, certain web sites have sucked up the majority of the traffic. Amazon in the retail world, Google in the search world, and we all have our on line bank accounts and participate in our favorite online clubs and organizations. Is there still room for the odd individual to make something unique and hope someone wanders in and connects with him or her? Maybe too much room, because everyone is standing in Amazon’s rainforest of books, dvds, electronics, clothing retailers, toys, jewelry and everything else.

If you get a chance to break away from the crowds, check out Greasyfur Unlimited, but don’t expect the site to be done!