THE DESIGNER

The role of the designer has grown alongside the popularity of the web. The original sites designed by technicians, glorified the technical capabilities of the web but ignored the "look and feel" of it, how it looked to the eye and how it worked for the user. Graphic designers were slow to embrace this media and early results of this were a multitude of "hacker sites" with coarse, crude screens.

The designers had their reasons to hesitate. It is a media which is still very much in its early stage of development. Invented to transmit text and information, it does not lend itself well to images and graphics. The software and programming languages, including Java and HTML are difficult and clumsy, reminiscent of the early forms of DOS. HTML is a HyperTextMarkUpLanguage which was developed for structuring text and information, not images or graphics. To create interesting pages with images, animations or complex layouts requires thought and ingenuity from the designer. It is necessary almost to "cheat" HTML to use it to their advantage. For this reason designing for the Internet is often approached in a negative manner by designers, with constant dwelling on the limitations within the design process. "Not many designers try to take control of HTML, instead they let it control them."30

Undoubtedly, the Internet has opened up great opportunities for designers, both creatively and financially. However, a successful designer does not always equal a successful "new media" designer. The designer must add more skills to their portfolio to create a good site.

They must be able to work in teams. The introduction of desktop publishing isolated the designer to a certain extent. The computer did away with the need for basic illustrators and typesetters and left the designer on his or her own in front of a computer. However, digital media has reversed this again. It is a hybrid media in its elements, but it is also hybrid in its creative process. The production involves a team of people ranging from designers to engineers to film makers and photographers. It has been called an "art/science co-operation" and this allows for a crossover and interaction between many disciplines. 31

Designers must also be good planners and organisers. A huge advantage the Internet has over print or any other mass media, is its ability to store archives. A designer must be able to organise and handle large databases and design the navigation to and around them. Navigation is something that a designer rarely has to think about in print, where it is already clearly laid out. However, navigation is of huge importance on the Internet. The WWW is essentially a bundle of loose pages which are connected in many different ways. The designer's job, besides creating the aesthetics of the site, is to create the navigation between these loose pages. A website's prime purpose is to inform, but to do this the user must want to stay at a site. With the abundance of other sites just a click away, a user will not stay at a badly designed site, which is difficult to navigate through or which takes a long time to download. A web user is notoriously more impatient than the user of any other media, and the designer must keep this in mind.

DESIGNING FOR THE WEB

"People are missing the hidden power of HTML if they start throwing lots of graphics into it and ignore what you can do with just the basic specifications. Background colour, frames, type - all of those things can be used creatively and cleverly." 32

There are two possible traps for a web designer to fall into when designing for the web. There are those designers who are heavily influenced by print and who make the mistake of transposing what they were doing on paper to the new medium. This results in loads of JPEG and GIF images that would look great in print but which look terrible on screen. Then there are the designers who take full advantage of the technical capabilities of the web and its extra media elements and who rush to put every moving image, sound file and spinning and flashing animation possible on the web. It is to this trend which Tilson is referring in his statement.

There are many technical aspects to take into consideration about the user when designing a website. Not every user is viewing the web through the same pair of eyes; not everyone's hardware specifications are the same. People have different computers with monitors of different sizes, resolutions and colours. The designer has to cater for the person who has a very small monitor with low resolution and limited colours, basically the lowest common denominator. But likewise, the site must work on a state of the art monitor just as successfully.

Others things to consider are the browser type and plug-ins. Browsers are software packages which allows us to view the web through a window on our desktop. Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer are the most popular, but both have different specifications and show some sites differently. Plug-ins are "helper" programmes which help these browsers to view particular websites. Most of them deal with animation, video and sound such as "Shockwave" and "Real Audio". Often it is necessary to download a specified plug-in before viewing a site or part of a site. Therefore, the designers are risking alienating a huge section of users without access to these plug-ins. The Economist in its article "Poorly Designed Websites", claims that many companies are,

"far too ambitious, and overburden the site with the latest graphics and animations, to the extent that a visitor has to download software before the site can be even viewed." 33

The browsers lead to another problem for the designers. All text is defaulted to 12pt Times with 12pt Courier as an alternative. However, most browsers can change fonts which means the user can view a site in a font that the designer did not want at all. This gives the user unparalleled control over how they view the new medium. The user can also change the site to a text only version on some sites which completely alters the design and which basically renders the designer redundant. A good site should work no matter what settings the user sets the browser to.

Another important factor to take into consideration is the speed of the modem and connection to the Internet. Modem speeds range from 28.8 kbpm (kilobytes per minute) to 56.6 kbpm with the average speed 33.3kbpm and this defines the "bandwidth" or the amount of data transferable across the connection. Designers cannot create a site which will take hours to download on a 28.8kbpm modem. Again they have to cater for the lowest common denominator. A site should not hinge on an elaborate animation or piece of film which takes a long time to download.

These technical considerations all need to be addressed by the designer. For this reason it is best that the designer has a knowledge of programming. If they can program as well as write HTML they will understand the programming tricks that save downloading times and generally make a site work better. In this way, life will be far more pleasant for the user.

UNDERSTANDING THE USER

Perhaps more important than the technical considerations is the need for the designer to understand their user. As Donald Norman, author of The Design of Everyday Things says,

"The first principle of human interface design, whether for a doorknob or a computer, is to keep in mind the human being who wants to use it. The technology is subservient to that goal." 34

He suggests the solution is in familiarity and the use of consistent metaphors with pictures and icons. There are many questions which the designers must ask themselves while designing the navigation. To do this the designer must both put themselves in the users place and also test the site on potential users. This testing is vital to the production process and will answer such questions as "How does the site fit into the WWW as a whole?, Do I always know where I am both within the site and in relation to the rest of the web?, Do I know what options are available to me and what they will all do?, How will I know if a link has failed or succeeded?" These questions are all very relevant to a visitor to the site for the first time and especially if the user has arrived at the site via a link.35

If a user arrives at a site, the first thing he or she will notice is the interface, the "look" of the site. An interface should compliment the content of the site and remain somewhat consistent throughout. It should be clear and basic and this is where the advocators of flashing and spinning icons fall down. Although nice to look at, they often detract the user¹s eye from the text or information and too many can bore the user easily. Software pioneer, Dan Bricklin recently warned at a publishing press conference that "intricate graphics and dancing logos were more likely to distract the reader¹s attention." 36

As previously stated interactivity is what separates the WWW from any other form of media, and the design of the interactivity is of huge importance. The user must feel in control of the site and their path through it. They must never feel as if they are just watching, they must always feel involved and a part of it. They must be able to see a result on screen if they click, roll over or scroll. They must get something back for effort put in.

Understanding the user and their computing habits is very important. When, where and why the user will access the WWW and the level of privacy which the user has, will determine the level of familiarity the user has with computing and the Internet. If the designer is aware of these initial parameters, the design process will run more smoothly.

Too many magazines on the web today look like the designer has taken the printed page and pasted it into the browser window. The opportunities to expand the content and design has been overlooked. This problem, dubbed "shovelware", involves the shovelling of data across the media gap; from print to digital. 37 There's no point in reproducing stale and static print design on the web because surrounded by moving pictures, animations and sound it will not succeed. It is the designer's role to make their site stand out and to do this they must embrace all the qualities the new medium offers.

There has been a certain backlash within the design community towards the WWW. With many publishers, including those of Vogue and Speak openly admitting a dislike of the Internet in its current state, it is hard for some magazines to produce an exciting and "shovelware free" site. 38 It is possible that the amount of low quality content and design on the web, its wide accessibility and the opportunity for anyone to publish on the net is producing this backlash from designers, potential users and advertisers alike. Not everyone can get their work published in a magazine, newspaper or broadcasted on television, yet almost anyone can publish on the web. This inevitably results in a poor quality of design and more often than not, content. However, for many it is this openness and ethos of sharing which is the attraction of the web. The arguments can continue, but there's no denying that digital media is here to stay, the only question is whether print can stave off the takeover.

30. Daniel Donnelly, Web Design: the New Generation, Thames & Hudson, UK, 1998, Pg. 50

31. Faber, op.cit., intro

32. Faber, op.cit., intro

33. Economist, Poorly Designed Websites, (Nua Internet Surveys - 4/3/98), visited - 19/1/99

34. Crystal Waters, Web Concept and Design, New Riders, USA, 1996, Pg. 67

35. Nico Macdonald, Not as other Media, Eye magazine, 26/97

36. Infoworld Electric, Traditional Media is Dying, (Nua Internet Surveys- 20/3/98), visited - 19/1/99

37. Faber, op.cit., intro.

38. Appendix 2, op.cit