The appeal of chunky designs

George Carless

As we've been working to get the new website up and running (and it's a work in progress, of course-- as all websites are!), we've put quite a lot of thought into the way we wanted to look so that it best represented who we are, the kinds of projects we feel we excel at, and so forth.

The results have been somewhat surprising, as you can probably see. We come from a background where tangible success matters - as judged by firm metrics as to things like new sales, site registrations, click-throughs, calls-to-action called into action. It's a much less sexy consideration than more intangible, personal things like visceral responses, fuzzy feelings, aesthetic appreciation - but what we've found over the years is that that's not necessarily a bad thing.

There's arguably a place for design that is just beautiful, for designing for its own sake. But the best designers recognize that form is most often successful when it follows function; and this is seldom more true than in web design. When we were thinking about our favourite websites on the web, we found again and again that the sites we came back to were-- irrespective of the category, or the complexity of the task for which the sites were designed--beautifully simple, elegantly clean, transcendentally intuitive. But, even more pertinently-- they were very often chunky.

A good part of what adds up to the elusive "Web 2.0" is, beyond AJAX and social networking and all of that, a trend towards large, chunky buttons, large, chunky logos, large, chunky text. Indeed, this visual aspect is perhaps one of the most valid reasons for the "2.0" in the term: it's an indication that, unlike in the 1.x days, designers have truly started to embrace the fact that the web really is a different medium, with its own goals and design considerations.

And so, as we've been putting things together, we've aimed on the chunky side for the things we really want people to be able to 'hit' easily: our site navigation, for example, probably wouldn't be called beautiful by many, but our tests have shown that it works a lot better - with its big text and absence of complicating sub-navigation - than do many much 'better looking' navigation menus.

Similarly, on our new services page, we decided to avoid long paragraphs of description--at least on the main page--or pretty icons, elaborate flash animations, and so forth. Our rationale? Our expertise covers a lot of different areas, but most of our clients couldn't care less about 85% of what we do. On the other hand, they probably have a pretty good idea about the specific services that they DO care about, so we wanted to give them an easy way to quickly find out about those specific services. So we put another staple of 'web 2.0', the tag cloud, to a somewhat non-conventional use - as a primary navigation element on the page.

Actually, the use of a tag cloud goes beyond that, and closer to the more typical use of a tag cloud. We sometimes joke that of the "u" words we might talk about, we probably don't want to be known for our odour! In fact, though, we're strong proponents of what Jared has to say about scent: that good websites providing 'scent' for visitors to follow. We're very interested in finding out what scents appeal the most to our visitors, so that we can better tailor our offerings to suit their needs. So, we've designed our services page such that the tag cloud indicates the links- and thus the services- that have been most visited by other users. It's an experiment; we'll see how it turns out.

So, as we continue to build out the site, we hope we won't alarm anybody if what we come up with isn't something you might find in a traditional design magazine. In fact, it might just be blocky, ugly, and smelly.