When I read a book or a magazine, I want to get to what’s important. It is similar to our talks about the internet and the points made in the article “Is Google Making Us Stupid??” When we do research or read articles on the internet, our tendency is to search for what is important. It is the same when I pick up a book, except I don’t skip sections of text or look for highlighted titles that tell me where to look. I want to read the whole page without being distracted by colorful pictures and strange layouts.
Consider the picture of a webpage below. If I came across the page while browsing the internet, I would switch to something else right away because it is too much and too confusing for me to deal with. It is so much easier to just find a different site that will just give me the information I need without the flashing advertisements and hundreds of links.
Take the picture on page 160 of “thinking with type”. If I were reading a magazine and came across this page (in English), I would likely skip over the picture because there is simply too much happening at one time. Designers now seem to like the kinds of programs that allow you to make flexible grids, but it seems to me to be more distracting than anything else. In her article “Designing with Grid-based approach”, Vitaly Friedman says that grids are supposed to “enhance the visual experience of visitors” and make it “easier [to] follow the consistency of the page.” This doesn’t seem to happen all the time.
So the question is, why are people becoming attracted to these more flexible and in my opinion distracting grids? Is it because we have been changed by our internet use? Is the internet really changing the way we think like Nicolas Carr suggests? I think so. Most people now seem to need all the images that border on sensory overload so they don’t get bored.
Don’t get me wrong. Grids can be very good things. They organize data and for the most part increase the readability. It often forces designers to “think in linear terms” (Lupton 171), but I’m worried that we are getting so caught up in making things look unique and exciting that we are distracting too much from the actual content.
I agree with this. I think the grid was originally meant to be used as a guide, not to be seen on the page. It seems to me that the websites that show the grids do so because they have too much information on the page. Without the grids, each section of content would blend into the next. The problem is the advertisements. Imagine if the advertisements were stripped from the websites. What content would be left? Not much. But I guess there wouldn’t be much profit either.
ReplyDeleteI think a better use of a grid would be as a tool to separate content into the golden ratio, which Lupton discusses in her chapter on grids. The golden ratio visually separates the content into thirds, over and over again. Lupton also provides an example on her website. She refers to it as the “golden section.”
On another note, I just ran across an app (Readability) that can get rid of all the advertisements and show a site’s pages in a more readable fashion. But what happens when a designer has taken the time to design a website, either using a grid or following the golden ratio, and this app does away with all that work? Seems like that puts us back at square one with no layout. I also wonder what Carr thinks about this. If he had the app, would he be able to read through an entire article?