Comment by mr_overalls | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mr_overalls | Hacker News Reader

I'm an enthusiast of early 20th century architecture schools like Art Deco, Prairie Style, Streamline Moderne, and Danish Modern (for furniture & housewares) because the clean lines and geometric shapes can function as a design philosophy in a variety of areas.

And obviously, web aesthetics like Material Design already reflect the ideas of Bauhaus and other schools.

But has anyone tried to replicate the "feel" of specific architectural approaches in their web design? For example, how would Frank Lloyd Wright design a website? Is it possible to incorporate more organic approaches like Art Nouveau without producing too much distracting visual clutter?

Put another way, what architectural/design movements could provide inspiration for the next evolution of web design?

And as further food for thought, wouldn't widespread use of AR/VR would serve to strengthen the link between architecture and human-computer interaction? Your personal computing environment could become an actual space - in the architectural sense - in which to do work. The first thing I'm going to do, of course, is replicate the Johnson Wax Factory's Great Workroom.

https://goo.gl/PF665e

Architectural movements such as Brutalism are already making their way into web design - not in a good way, imho.

They’re distractions.

Web-design in my view should follow Swiss layout and typography which is widely considered to be the most objective, neutral, clear and universal theory of graphic design. Some parts of Swiss layout already permeate in everything we do - Grid system(Brockmann et al) for example. Or Helvetica and Univers in typography (Frutiger et al).

Everything else is decoration. Obviously, if you build a website for a music band, then all bets are off. My view is about common web design.

Why are "objective" and "neutral" desirable traits for most web pages?

To steal terms from Tufte: mostly data ink, minimum chartjunk.

Decoration exists on a continuum, and I don't think it's bad as long as it's not overdone - which is a subjective judgment call, of course.

Decoration exists for comfort, beauty, and usability. I particularly like this fantastic essay that explains the rationale for decoration in architecture, and how the current design preferences for stark simplicity came to be.

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/10/why-you-hate-contempo...

An excerpt: 'A few obvious stylistic changes characterize postwar architecture. For one, what is (now somewhat derisively) called “ornament” disappeared. At the dawn of the 20th century, American architect Louis Sullivan proclaimed the famous maxim that “form follows function.” Even though Sullivan’s own buildings were often highly ornate, adorned with elaborate Art Nouveau ironwork and Celtic-inspired masonry, “form follows function” was instantly misinterpreted as a call for stark utilitarian simplicity. A few years later, architect and theorist Adolph Loos, in a 1908 essay called “Ornament and Crime,” dramatically declared that a lack of ornamentation was a “sign of spiritual strength.” These two ideas quickly became dogmas of the architectural profession. A generation of architects with both socialistic and fascistic political leanings saw ornament as a sign of bourgeois decadence and cultural indulgence, and began discarding every design element that could be considered “mere decoration.”'

I didn’t claim Decoration and creativity is bad and said that when it’s required for cultural, aesthetic or media appeal then it makes sense, for example a music band website.

But a web framework should adopt the most neutral stance and designers can modify as they see fit. In other words, decorative frameworks as proposed by the OP that are based on an Architectural movement are not appropriate for majority of the webpages on the internet. They distract. Decoration distracts. Doesn’t mean it has no place in society.

Also, Dieter Rams proved that design can be un-decorated, yet inviting, comfortable and human centric. As a direct legacy to Rams, just look at the success of Apple and it’s stance on design. Personally, I argue that Decoration is shallow and doesn’t solve the fundamental goal in design : to make products and services that interface with humans easy to interact, understand and use. Instead Decoration distracts, deludes and creates confusion. It steals clarity and intent in design. In some cases, Decoration is not honest. Can you imagine Casinos built by Tadao Ando?

>Decoration distracts.

This is the principle that lead to the abhorrent and unusable flat design. Sometimes, lack of decoration distracts. Because it is this "decoration" that makes things look familiar. Without the decoration people have to stop and think and figure out things.

iOS 6 and below is an example of decoration making things more familiar and intuitive. As Steve Jobs designed it, the world inside the iPad screen was a seamless extension of the world outside the screen. When you went inside the iPad, everything looked familiar. But now we have a hard boundary at the device, and different rules apply inside that boundary. You have to learn and memorize new rules because the outside rules that you are already familiar with are of no help inside the screen.

I think you're confusing skeumorphism with decoration. Decoration is adding elements to design for the sake of aesthetic ornamentation. For example, Geocities websites had all kinds of blink tags and fireworks going on inside a webpage. That is decoration.

A save button icon that looks like a floppy disk is not decoration. It is a use of skeumorphic semiotics that takes advantage of historic familiarity - which is what you're referring to. I agree with you that it has its place in design. The original discussion of this thread is whether we should decorate websites with architectural motifs whether it is art-deco or brutalism.

> But a web framework should adopt the most neutral stance and designers can modify as they see fit. In other words, decorative frameworks as proposed by the OP that are based on an Architectural movement are not appropriate for majority of the webpages on the internet.

This is true. Not all web pages need high decoration. Think of art nouveau Google sheets. Hah, what a nightmare that would be. But I would say we make a mistake to say that most web pages are similar. That's how we get these design philosophies to end them all. What works for material design won't necessarily work for your design.

> Instead Decoration distracts, deludes and creates confusion. It steals clarity and intent in design. In some cases, Decoration is not honest.

You are describing ~BAD~ decoration and design. And I totally agree with you that bad decoration is the MOST detracting thing. But good decoration actually moves your eye, body, and intent towards better function. Art deco has many leading lines that guide people towards main entrances or even displays the ethos of the organization. Intuitively I know you think this is true because a web without any decoration would look like a terminal. Grids and layouts are decoration and if used improperly will distract users as well.

Brutalist buildings are awesome canvases for graffiti sprayers, they essentially just reclaim their environments by ornamentation.

Could you point to some examples?

Don’t design frameworks like bootstrap foundation and material design represent utility-first design?

As someone just getting into web development I've wondered the same thing. Web design frameworks seem to have all these wonderful designs but they're just not fulfilled of fleshed out as Art Nouveau or such ... but of course you can't just sort of copy and paste or you get all kinds of distracting elements.

Still there has to be a place / way this can be done. I've been trying to just use posters I like, starting with color patterns and such to get a feel for such things. I'm a noob so it's all elementary kinda attempts but there it feels like it should be doable.

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