doombot » Nominate a Website for the Design Canon

There’s an interesting conversation going on now over at Speak Up about why there aren’t any “landmark” websites. Armin Vit writes:

Milton Glaser’s Dylan poster. Paul Rand’s IBM logo. Paula Scher’s Public Theater posters. Massimo Vignelli’s New York subway map. Kyle Cooper’s Seven opening titles. These are only a few landmark projects of our profession. Design solutions that, in their consistent use as exemplary cases of execution, concept and process, don’t even need to be shown anymore and that, for better or worse, (almost) everyone acknowledges as being seminal works that reflect the goals that graphic design strives for: A visual solution that not only enables, but also transcends, the message to become memorable in the eyes and minds of viewers. [...] But when it comes to web sites, I can’t think of a single www that could be comparable — in gravitas, praise, or memorability — as any of the few projects I just mentioned. Could this be?

I think that’s a super good question, and I think that the first answer that pops to mind—that websites can’t have such landmark designs because of their primarily interactive nature—is a cop out. That is the answer that seems to come up most in the comments, or some variant thereof. I agree that for many sites, such as Google, it’s more important to have a functional experience than a striking design. (That’s why I don’t even go to Google.com anymore. I use a toolbar built right into my browser.) But that’s not to say that a website can’t be both of these things, and there are certainly sites that could be well served by being more striking. The problem, I think, is that web designers let “striking” get in the way of “functional,” and so you get a ridiculous Flash abomination that few will remember and some won’t ever see at all, thanks to their animation blocking plugins.

I could at least see people arguing that the technology for a truly iconic website simply isn’t there yet: It is, after all, far too difficult to do anything that’s both widely accessible and also typographically interesting, which leaves a lot of potential designs hamstrung one way or another. Web designs have another handicap in that it can be hard to realize a singular artistic vision unless you’ve got equal parts artsy designer and expert coder in your blood. But to argue that it just can’t be done because of the nature of the medium strikes me as intellectually lazy, like arguing that video games/comics/movies/novels can’t be art because the medium hasn’t (or hadn’t) proved its capabilities yet.

That said, I’m not coming up with much in the way of nominees here. First I started wondering if any webcomics might count, such as a particularly influential use of the infinite canvas principle; but it’s hard to claim something as influential when most webcomics are pretty much like their print cousins and thus served better by a site design that fades into the background. The only other example to come to mind was CSS Zen Garden, which certainly passes the “influential” test and is occasionally quite striking, but it’s more a testament to design technologies than any specific visual design. (And a quick search shows that one other commenter suggested it as well so far.) Perhaps you could suggest You’re the Man Now Dog as a sort of weirdly influential gallery of disturbing found-art pieces, but it’s more a collection of vernacular design than a good design in itself. A couple people piped up in favor of Flickr and Threadless, but honestly, these are not as easy to use as they could be, nor are they particularly attractive except insofar as they foreground occasionally beautiful content. “Not getting in the way of the content” should not be the pinnacle of visual design on the web, but a bare minimum expectation. Also, I agree with Armin’s original call that this should be something that delivers but also transcends its content.

Well, I’d like to hear your nominees if you have any. Skip the giant Speak Up comment thread and just reply right here, or blog about it yourself and steal our traffic if you prefer, you dog. I suppose you’ll say whatever you feel like saying, but I don’t want to hear any of this “the web is too young” bunk or any of that “design changes too fast” bullcrap. Arguable points both, but also way too easy. Tell us where there’s ever been a masterpiece on the web.

7 Comments so far

I wonder if part of the problem with coming up with an iconic website is related to the fact that the medium itself is changing so quickly. Take Apple, for example (oh you knew I couldn’t resist). They’ve had literally dozens of different designs for their website in the last twelve years. And unlike paintings and sculptures, which are often preserved for memory, websites for the most part aren’t (unless you count archive.org and Google’s cache). Not to mention that technology changes at such a rapid clip on the web as well. Consider the use of Flash today vs. just a few years ago.

Personally, I nominate Kai’s old EiC design. Which I don’t think exists any more, except in my head. But it was beautiful, especially for the time.

Okay, Dan ignored the instructions not to say “design changes too fast.” He took the bullet so none of you would have to. Moving on…

Part of me wants to nominate The Escapist’s old design, but I’m hesitant to do so because what worked about it was that it treated the screen more or less like a print magazine spread. Also, the text fell funny in its paragraphs, such that nearly every column ended in a widow.

Well designed websites are common… but a website that has become an iconic example of good design? I’m not sure one exists yet. The “technology is changing as we speak” argument seems valid to an extent. Designers were given CSS what three, four years ago? But regardless, it seems like there has been enough time between technological advancements for there to have been something by now.

But first off, I think it’s important to acknowledge the great variety in kinds of websites. It makes asking for a website that has become iconic design kind of like asking for an iconic use of paint–”website” is so general a term as to be the medium for design, not an immediate example of design itself. So I suspect one may need to be more specific and say what “blog” or “search engine” is iconic design.

Even after making this distinction however, I’m not sure there are blogs or search engines that have stood the design test of time, so maybe no website has transcended the technology precisely because the medium is mediated by technology? After all, despite all the new advancements that now go behind making a poster in the 21st century, you still end up with ink on paper. A logo is still a picture. Websites can have logos, but they exist on a machine (and not even yours) provided that machine is a Macintosh/PC with Firefox, Explorer, etc., and an internet connection. And then, no matter what the website, you use the same bubbly elevator buttons to scroll the page, adjust the window to view the site better, and so on. In other words, the experience of viewing a website is inexorably linked to the hardware and software used to view that site in the first place, perhaps hindering any transcendence that could take place.

But I have seen sites that made me forget I was visiting a website, and I think that’s gets closer to something transcendent, iconic. That these sites tend to involve flash technology is incidental (I can hear Jason groaning,) the strength of these sites relies on adding a layer of separation between the medium for the content, and the content itself, thereby allowing the content to be elevated by the design, and vice versa.

The websites featured here alternate between vapid flashiness, good design, and a transcendent experience, but I don’t think anything is iconic.

http://www.thefwa.com

…only one of various sites that cull “good sites.”

I shall attempt to redeem my previous comment by passing on this link to an essay by web designer Joshua Porter, in which he argues that the problem is not necessarily with the websites, but with the question and how we judge what should be canonical. Very good points.

I am pretty sure this is just another way of dodging my original question, but I will give you credit for coming at the answer from a different angle. I don’t disagree entirely with the argument here, but for the sake of making my original line of thinking clear, I’m going to play devil’s advocate a bit more.

The original question here, I think, is one that probably could be answered in the near future, if not the present. I don’t think the form itself precludes or inherently de-emphasizes aesthetic beauty. I think that saying “web sites should be measured by different standards from (say) posters” is kind of like saying “comics should be judged by different standards from art film”—makes sense insofar as that just means that there are different formal elements worthy of consideration, but is kind of a cop-out if used to mean that one can be visual “Art” and the other cannot.

Put another way: I think that saying “web designers have different standards” is exactly the problem. The article you linked suggests that web designers’ standards are right and graphic designers’ standards are wrong because they’re not the ones designing web pages. I think, though, that if there were fewer perceived technical barriers such that graphic designers were designing for the web more, utilizing similar standards to what we see in print, then we’d see more beautiful—and not necessarily less functional—websites. (I have made the same argument about visual aesthetics in gaming, actually, but that’s a topic for another day.)

[...] recently wrote a post calling for you, my dear friends, to suggest what we might consider a “canonic” or [...]

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