Design Issues

As with so many things it's a question of balance between the desire to have an opening page that is really an eye-catcher and to provide the information that web surfers have come to the site to find.

Even though there are many fascinating aspects to electronic documents, there are still common elements with the print media: Letters, memos, brochures, all the way to magazines and books. And these elements are questions of content, audience, and organization.

In other words, what you want to say and who are you saying it to, will determine how you are going to say it.

The big ecommerce sites have begun to look the same, filling the viewable area with text links and minimal graphics. They have learned that what their customers want is to get right to the product listings, and not have to wait for twenty or thirty images to load, including the extra images for "mouseOver" graphic links that light up before the potential shopper can click on them.

Even as the center-everything-with-a-repeating-background-image was the style of the mid nineties, now the huge inverted L graphic is becoming the cliche' of the turn of the millenium.

Once again we have proved the conclusion of the great design debate of the sixties:

Form follows function.

Final note: Broadband access is expected to reach a million users by the end of this year. That amounts to something substantially less than one percent of all users. *

David Freeman
davidefreeman@yahoo.com

* This was written in the Fall of 1999. Since then broadband penetration in the U.S. has risen to a high of about 12%, and then apparently fallen off a bit as ISPs come and go.

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