What happens when your inner
Sunday, February 24th, 2002What happens when your inner reader and inner write gang up on your inner designer?
Designers — web or print — are by nature control freaks. Our attention to detail down to the last point, pica, or pixel has earned us many other, even less-flattering titles, but I think “control-freak” is probably the most telling. Our meticulous temperament is what allows us to forge things of beauty out of the careful arrangement of space, color, and form. We learn to attract and keep attention through our control of the elements within our design universe.
We web designers in particular sometimes get so caught up in our own work that we forget about the reader. We build our pages with more regard for design than for the individuals who will be visiting our pages; everything, to us, should be subservient to our design. We designed that page with 9px Verdana for a reason, and nothing will make us change it even though our defense, invariably, amounts to nothing more than “Because it looks cool.”
From the time I hand-coded my first web page in 1995 to the present, I’ve been guilt of this practice many, many times. Sometimes the lure of coolness is too powerful for either me or my clients to overcome, and while we bask in the glow of pixel-love we fail to realize that our pages set in 9px Verdana can be difficult to read. Some readers may have impaired vision, some may be color-blind, or some may just have their screen resolutions set higher than ours, at which point trying to read 9px Verdana can result in headaches or, more likely, moving on to a more forgiving website. And of course, there are always the cross-browser/cross-platform issues to deal with.
So what happens when the time comes for us to design a site where the reader matters, and nothing else? Forget the cool designs, eye-catching graphics, the gratuitous use of flash…what do you do? How do you present the site’s content so that reader will enjoy it, not curse it?
You learn to let go. And, if you’re me, you do it the hard way.
Like many web designers, I maintain several personal web sites. Among them is jasonmnovak.com, my personal site for web publishing. For two years now, jasonmnovak.com has entertained millions (okay, hundreds) with heavily-designed text: poems, essays, fiction, weblogs, etc. While its various guises have been fairly minimalist by nature, they have all been equally controlling. From the early days of heavy font tag usage to the later, more strict and less forgiving CSS implementations, you either read how I wanted you to read, or you didn’t read at all.
This two-year-long saga, commonly referred to as Novak’s Folly, is drawing to a close. The writer in me (concerned less with design and more with being able to share his words with more people) and the reader in me (who recently made another unhappy trek to LensCrafters for new glasses, grumbling the whole while about the ravages of time) finally ganged up on the designer in me, and in the process of beating the tar out of him, beat in the simple notion of legibility. The outcome: I will soon be re-launching jasonmnovak.com with a tiny new feature that lets visitors customize the entire site with the typeface, type size, and type color of their choice, thanks to a little blend of CSS and ColdFusion. (Future releases will incorporate even finer levels of customization.)
Now, I admit the result is not a beautiful site. My inner designer mentally checks out when I pull up jasonmnovak.com. But my inner reader does back-flips. This site will not win any awards, and it won’t get any “site of the day” traffic…but thanks to the little menu in the top-right corner, it will be a pleasure to read.
I realize that on the scale of things, this degree of customization is nothing new for the web. But it’s something new for this web designer, and I think that if I can start to change my attitudes toward web design, there’s hope for the thousands of you out there beating your readers to death with 9px Verdana.