Realigner or Redesigner?

Cameron Moll explores the difference between what he calls “redesigners” and “realigners” in the A List Apart article “Good Designers Redesign, Great Designers Realign.”

Cameron’s being polite in the title. I would say amatuer designers redesign, professional designers realign—and it goes well beyond the young field of Web Design. Most professional creatives I know fall under the “realign” category, although Cameron is the first to give the practice such a catchy title.

Whether in print or Web, broadcast or mobile content publishing, it’s about the content and usability. Paintings are art. Sculptures are art. Websites, too, can be art, but only if they have no other purpose, no information to disseminate. If your goal is to paint a pretty picture, then paint it in your medium of choice. But if you intend to convey some kind of message, to say something others might read, to sell a product or service, or to build a brand, that concern trumps any and all design decisions. Or, more accurately, the purpose and intention of the site is what decides the design.

My personal website, I am Pariah.com, gets complimented frequently. It’s easy to navigate, with a clear hierarchy of first-, second-, third-, and, when needed, fourth-level navigation. Information is presented in an easy to read format, with a clear hierarchy of textual and graphical elements. There’s breathing room in the whitespace, and that whitespace has been activated, allowing it to not only act as a resting place for the eye, but to become part of the design and act as part of the structure and order of the layout.

Personally, I’m no longer all that impressed with my website.

That site design is three years old now. So why do I keep it? Why haven’t I redesigned my personal site at least annually like many other designers do? Well, in part, I’ve been too busy working; I wrote a couple of books, I built Designorati, I’ve been managing Quark VS InDesign.com, and I’ve been servicing my clients. Really, though, those are only the reasons the portfolio section of my Website is so far out of date. I have actually worked quite a bit on I Am Pariah.com over the last three years.

What I’ve done is subtle and always in response to useability and information presentation concerns—either direct requests from readers or by watching my server logs and talking to people to understand how they use my site. The point of my personal website is, primarily, to be read… OK. really it’s about me expressing myself. Therefore it’s point is to be readable; whether it’s actually read is a lower priority for me—I write plenty of other Websites and articles with that purpose in mind. But I’ve changed the site subtley—things like: tucked level-three navigation in tighter in the middle bar to level-two navigation, adjusted the leading on various types of text, reduced the size of a couple of graphics by a few pixels each, and cushioned the whitespace between columns a bit more.

While I would love to redesign it—I’ve caught myself sketching a new layout in Illustrator more than once—I know that, right now, it doesn’t need it. Right now it answers readers’ needs and fulfills the site’s purpose very well. Is it perfect? Of course not; it was created by a human being, so it will never be perfect. More importantly, even if it were perfect at one moment in time, it’s a dynamic website with lots of changing content. The layout must therefore forever adapt to suit the content and the means by which others interact with that content.

Designorati—Designed or Aligned?

Some have said basically that Designorati’s homepage is design and aesthetics-driven rather than aligned to present content. If that’s your position, then I’m the one who designed it (if you like it, however, then it was a team effort between myself and the founding members of Designorati).

The Designorati homepage—like every other feature of the site—was designed after the content. I didn’t come up with a spiffy look then try to cram content where ever it fit. No, a flowchart of the content was drawn up, then the design built to accommodate and present that content, within the hierarchy established by the chart.

Did I do a great job on the homepage? Some say yes, other say no. Me, I think I could have done better.

It’s not fulfilling its function of clearly presenting the most important, most recent, and most interesting headlines and features as well as I feel it should. I’m working on that. (You’ll probably like the results, so it’s safe to tell you it’s a team effort.) The thing is, Designorati has a lot of content, and presenting it orderly and aesthetically is a challenge—it’s a welcomed and envigorating challenge, but takes some though and experimentation.

So, if you don’t like the Designorati homepage, or any aspect of the rest of the site, tell us—tell me; I take responsibility for anything you don’t like, but the whole team gets credit for what you do. Give me specifics like “I don’t like this because it makes this other thing hard to read” or even “I can’t find that.” Those types of statements are immensely helpful to us in helping you find what you want on Designorati. We’re not looking for someone to tell us how to design—we’ve got more than 100 years of combined professional design experience between us. What we are looking for is for you to speak up. We just want you to tell us what you say to yourself when you visit Designorati.

Designorati is for you to read and interact with. If the design doesn’t make that as easy and enjoyable a process as it could, tell us. We’ll realign the design to meet your needs—that’s what visual communications is all about.

Update 17 July 2007: The above was written while Designorati was in version 1.0 (September 2005 through January 2006). As of 17 July 2007, Designorati is in version 3.0—a major realignment and complete redevelopment of the site navigation, design, and content organization. The same process held—content organization came first, and then the design was built around the site’s content and organizational hierarchy. As always, we’re open to feedback.