In all the discussion about the death of newspapers and the appeal of online content, the importance of the aesthetic appeal of a medium is sometimes ignored. In relation to online media, it is often the usability of the site which will most significantly affect its design – and although aesthetics play a part in usability, they do not necessarily take precedence.
I think this is an area where newspapers still win. The traditional newspaper design is actually incredibly appealing and doesn’t create the same choice anxiety as an article on a webpage might. I think people like simplicity in design. I first started thinking about this in relation to newspapers after seeing this talk by a newspaper designer – here Jacek Utko talks about the effect of good design on the newspapers on which he has worked:
When I think about my online reading habits, there are three main things that keep me returning to a site. They are:
- Relevance
- Quality of content
- Design
The first two are quite obvious – I am online to look for something in particular, or something to enhance my everyday experience. Relevance usually trumps the others – for example, I don’t think The Age website is of an incredibly high quality or very well designed, but it is not horrible on either of those counts and because it is local is relevant to my daily life (in general) it is my most frequently viewed site.
I will return to a site for quality of content even if it doesn’t have the other two factors – although will still be relevant in the sense I am interested in whatever it is focused on. The accessibility and speed associated with online content has exposed us to an unprecedented level of bad writing, so when I find something that is considered and well written it is really exciting.
But it is the third factor, design, that I think is probably least discussed when considering the success /failure of websites. In our first class for Digital Media, we had to choose our favourite site. Without too much hesitation, I chose The Guardian. In terms of my three criteria for reading a site, I would rank the Guardian thus: 1. Design 2. Content 3. Relevance. Despite the news website being very UK focused, I am happy to return because it has some interesting articles and I like to poke my head up above the Australian view of the world sometimes.
But mainly I keep returning because it is so pretty. See:
I pretty much like everything about the design of this site, both in the sense of usability and aesthetic appeal. The multicoloured double layered menu along the top acts as a colour and visual key to what you read, so that no matter how many times you click, you know how far you have gone from the homepage and how you got there.
They also use high quality images for all their tabs on the page, which can make the most unappealing story seem interesting. The Age could take a leave out of their book and stop publishing bad, blurring, overexposed, tabloid type photos that someone has hurriedly added text to in Photoshop.
I am constantly amazed at how few websites get design right. Obviously they cannot function under the same design theories as a newspaper, but maybe we should be thinking more about the successes of that design (not to mention the design of print magazines, which are often the most beautiful examples of content and images combined) when creating websites.
A final example is a publication, InDaily (out of Adelaide) which is hedging its bets by retaining the newspaper design online. It is not a perfect format, not least because it kind of ignores the potential of the online medium, but there is something to be said for its hat tip to newspaper design – it is an effort to retain the simplicity which makes reading the newspaper pleasurable.
Posted by bowerbirdblue 
