The Adventures of Cindy Li

SXSW 2006: Traditional Design and New Technology

March 11 , 2006

Speakers

Boulton:Designers that come out now don’t know about tracking/leading/etc.
Greaves: What is design and what is print?
Vinh: What is its life offline and what is it’s life on-line?
Santa Maria:  How do the constraints of the medium affect design’s role?
What is the transition from 10 years ago from the web to the web?
How is the page designed?  The expectations of the content?

Think about how you want to read the page?

Art direction: The art direction on a team vs story telling…
print you don’t have to build a press each time for a book but you have to do that on the web by thinking about the navigation/how the page loads/etc.
Use the knowledge you have today and put it up right now.
Santa Maria: hierarchy of positions but now there are people that wear many hats.

sidenote:::cough cough::: at AOL we do.

A wave of where design used to be and where design is going

Someone that sets the headline in the old days..and then web design then people are doing it themselves (everything) and now its starting to be specialized again.
Boulton: conventions and maturity of the media. The technology isn’t questioned every time we create a page.
Vinh: When we go forward and look at design that impressed us in 2006. We’re more impressed with what is amazing at the time. Mark is talking about what the older pages were constrained under.
SM: will we feel the emotional attachments later?
Vinh: we think websites are impressive for what it can do now

Do print design techniques apply online?

penguin.uk (http://www.markboulton.co.uk/)

SM: difference between techniques, and principles
basic principles: legibility, hierarchy and what you can gain from print design that you can apply to web design.

The penguin design doesn’t have the same emotional appeal that the book does. The book designs have changed over the years but there is an emotional attachment w/the same design.

How does the role of the designer changed?

Vinh:People on-line just want the information and leave.
Companies are trying to think about usability enough and aren’t using expressiveness to keep the reader.
Greaves: Craigslist is utilitarian use. IT is now the brand for Craigslist. Maybe ebay should go more that route.
SM: are you talking about the beauty of visual or the function?
Greaves: Simplicity of it. For its purpose it is what it is.

RSS succeeds because people just want what they want. No design.

Is web a rejection of traditional design?
Getting what you want when you want it.

MB: design is for usability/voice/cropping images. RSS still has design involved.
Vinh: On-line digital media is a full fledged medium. Some content delivered in print isn’t design and some is.
MB: If you look back the rejection is design.

How has new technology changed traditional design?

MB: technology has changed design, we have a reliance on it. We ask big companies to change it.
There are some old school designers will not make the switch to web. Neville Brody won’t go near the design.
Greaves: Navigation is something pulled from print before but now it has gone even further.
SM: Film photography is going to be more of an art form.

Emotional connection based on content, presentation

Should we be thinking about new ways to make emotional connection since some of the print methods don’t work on-line?