Digital Culture Studies

At least once a week we end up in a bookstore. I don’t know exactly how it happens, but I do know that being married to someone that reads …. really reads, not just the latest James Patterson and Star Magazine….is, in the immortal words of Thakeray, totally awesome.

Stop writing about books! This is a technology blog! But design fascinates me, and to illustrate something I see far too often online, I want to show you some offline examples.

Take this book:

Not a bad design. This is the hardcover version of The Wonder Spot. Dramatic angle on the scene, nice visual clues about what the story might contain (fish out of water, coming of age, maybe a young woman and a journey, etc). Its written by a woman, but there isn’t a shoe or a shopping bag on the cover, so it might be a relatively literary read. I saw it ages ago, and filed it away in my head as maybe a decent summer read, or a good book for a plane.

So you can imagine my surprise when I walked into Borders last weekend and saw the paperback version.

The red is hard to replicate from a reduced size jpg, but it is a little faded, and looks like a worn piece of paper. The edges are jagged, with some shadow beneath them. There is a beige circle in the middle, with the title of the book, and now, inexplicably, two elephants, leaning on each other.

What does the design tell you about the story? A better question might be, how does the design move the story along? A cover isn’t just a cover. It is a visual blurb, all adjectives and action verbs. Now look at that cover, and tell me what this story is about.

Better still, look at this cover, and tell me what the difference between these two books is.

Although the colour on both is a little off on my moniter, in person, it is nearly identical, both the red background and the beige circle. On the Bee Season cover, the red is meant to look like a worn piece of paper with jagged edges. And there is the title of the book, in a beige circle in the middle.

Bee Season is the older of the two books.

And it makes me wonder what happened here. Was the intent to capture the same kind of readers that would pick up Bee Season? Maybe readers who liked Bee Season? Was it intentional? And if so, why? Why change a good cover to imitate another book’s cover?

Over the past 3 years I have seen variations of this red pop up on the covers of books written by women, and I suspect it has something to do with wanted to distance the book from chick-lit, and the myriad of books being marketed today that have covers featuring shoes, handbags, and martinis, done in pink and green and Tiffany blue. I am not knocking light fiction - I like to see people read, and light fiction has its place.

But design is about the alignment of product and message, and the message here is, ‘well, it worked for Bee Season’. It bothers me, recycled design.

The wonder of the internet for me is all personal broadcasting and personal vision. If you have a web page, it can look like, be like, anything you can imagine. So why on earth do so many of them look the same?

You can blame Web 2.0 for the current crop of design similarities, the white backgrounds, the McSweeney-ing of making web sites look print-like. But I don’t. This is not about blaming anyone for the current crop of design similarities, but I do think this would be a good time for designers to start thinking less about making web sites that look exactly like other web sites and more about how to use the tools of development and design to push the medium forward. CSS is wonderful, but not if all we use it for is the same grid of tables in the same place, to do the same things, on every page we build.

Jakob Nielson says that it is good for designers to copy each other. Not surprisingly, I disagree. While I understand the importance of user-friendly web design, at the same time, I believe that the web is the ultimate design playground, and in the beginning, design was about pushing boundaries and playing, playing with one’s full scope of imagination. Perhaps for retail outlets online, sameness is good. But for the rest of it - why? Why do so many sites have Amazon’s tabs, and why are so many built so that it is nearly impossible to tell when you have surfed off of one site and on to another?

Where are the great design experiments, now? Where is the 2006 version of Lance Arthur’s Soulflare? Or The Remedi Project? Is there anybody out there in 2006 pushing the boundaries regarding design the way Osil8 was in 1997? I could get all nostalgic, that that is for another entry. This entry is about design, and how all these incredibly talented and creative people converged online in the mid-90s, and a decade later, design is about making everything look more the same. It is about having having this hardback cover:  

                                              and turning it in to this:

I really like that second cover. I thought it was was eye catching and it made me pick the book up in the store, which is the point, except that I then realized that I thought it was this book, which I was planning on buying as a gift.

Same font face, same 3 colour design, same sillhouette cut out of the front with a black page beneath, same layout, same….everything.

What I wonder about all of this, are we seeing the influence of ’sameness design’ leaking from the web to other design products, or vice versa? Did badly designed books come before badly designed web sites? Is the web democratizing bad design?

Posted Design |