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The
Glassdog Barks
An interview with
Lance Arthur, the man behind Glassdog
Conducted via email by John S. Rhodes
(17-July-2001)
Design!
What is design?
What does it mean to you?
I used to think
design was the appearance of things, how they looked, what you noticed
visually when examining a thing. If you look at one salt shaker and look at
another salt shaker, you know they'll be able to accomplish their task to
varying degrees. All they need to do is deliver a shower of sodium chloride
where you happen to be pointing the end with the holes. You might want to
make your salt shaker out of glass or wood or plastic, but probably not
metal because salt has a detrimental effect on certain metals. So, you have
a very simply task, one necessary ingredient giving you some important
dimensions and operations and some limitations concerning what you can use
and how large it needs to be.
So when you design
that salt shaker, you can either adhere to or abandon preconceptions about
how salt shakers have been designed, which goes to why they were designed to
fit in one hand, or to have grinders attached, or to combine them with
pepper shakers, and so on. Design is about taking a set of criteria
concerning an operation or need and refining the set of rules and materials
and expectations concerning that thing and coming up with your own solution
that answers the need or performs the operation.
What was your greatest design struggle ever? What made it so hard? How
did you finally overcome the challenge?
I normally
challenge myself in my own creations more than I am ever challenged by
clients or under professional circumstances because I enjoy finding
solutions to problems - even when I am inventing problems that really don't
exist. By and large, clients require easy, inexpensive (not time-consuming)
solutions that answer simple problems. They don't want to refine paradigms,
they want to sell stuff.
Curiously, I've
found an inverse relationship between a problem's simplicity to its
solution. Complicated problems often have very simple solutions and vice
versa.
Probably the
greatest design struggle I had was creating the sliding menu used at
glassdog.com - a device that did not really resolve a problem that existed
at all. What I wanted was a method of making a navigation scheme easily
accessible no matter where a visitor was on any page of a site. The
navigation is a key factor in a site's usability. If you can't figure out
how to get around a site chances are you won't be back. And obvious
navigation is easy to do. And I could certainly have left well enough alone
with a static navigation stuck to the top and bottom of every page as usual,
but I wanted something that was also elegant and, to be blunt, called
attention to itself.
Part of what I do
at glassdog, since I can, is test theories and challenge assumptions
regarding web page design - mostly my own theories and assumptions. I wanted
a single navigation device viewable in all browsers embedded on a single
page, not using frames, that would call attention to itself to remind
readers there are other places to go, so don't leave yet. Could I make it so
it was obtrusive, but not annoying, and compact enough to provide enough
information to figure out where you went if you wanted to, but not so
data-intense that you'd never bother with it because there's too much to get
through.
So I had to toy
and fudge and tweak and play and fidget and came up with what's there now.
Is it successful? Like everything else on the Web, the answer depends on
whom you ask. Most of the people concerned strictly with usability say no,
it's not. Same goes for designers. But I think it straddles the fence and
offers a bit of both.
Would I install it
on a client site? Probably not. But I worked so hard on it I haven't been
able to give it up.
Yet.
How do convert an emotion into a design? When you have a strong feeling,
how do you make other people feel it?
I don't think
that's an aim of design, actually. Emotion belongs in art, and while it can
be easy to confuse one for the other - and sometimes they can be the same
thing - you need to decide as a designer what your goal is, and it is rarely
an emotional goal. Emotion is more likely a by-product of the goal.
This goes back a
little to your original question. What is design? So now I'll answer the
second part, what is art? When do the lines cross? When do you create
something as a designer that is something from an artist's palette?
When you have a
design assignment, your goal is not usually to convey an emotion. When you
are designing a marketing plan, one of your goals is to create an emotional
appeal. You may need to create a design around that goal as well, but the
*design* goal should not be confused with the *marketing* goal. You're
designing something that's easy to use and easy on the eyes. Attractive and
accessible.
Different design
tasks have different goals and different expectations. Your client might
tell you they want something "elegant" or "beautiful" or
"cutting edge," none of which are strictly emotional. You never
feel cutting edge. You can feel excited, you can feel engaged, you can feel
amazed, you can feel pumped. You can also feel beautiful, but that's a
reflection of how you look rather than how you feel. You feel attractive.
You feel sexy.
The bottom line is
that designing an emotion is difficult, so you should steer away from using
those terms in your initial goals. Rather, concentrate on styles that evoke
emotions. Baroque or art nouveau or post modern or pop. These are about
romanticism, elegance, simplicity and fun.
You have inspired many people with your designs and advice. How is
designing part of your personality? Who has inspired you?
I notice design
more than I used to, which is both practical and annoying. I also used to
borrow other people's opinion of good design, down-playing my own opinions
of art and graphics as being ill-informed and uneducated when others had
attended college and had pragmatic and professional experience I lacked. But
as I get older, I come to trust my own tastes and opinions and stick to my
own guns more than I used to. Public opinion is often wrong - frequently so
when it comes to things like television and auto design I've found. The
majority is also the lowest common denominator. On the bell curve of life,
I'd rather be on the high side than simply agree with what everyone else
thinks.
I also find that I
make decisions based on a gut feeling that I can't even articulate. The
clothing I select or the furniture I surround myself with have changed over
and over. When I lived on the east coast I bought a lot of Ralph Lauren and
plaid and Shaker style in dark wood. Now that I'm in California, I buy
Calvin Klein and Eames and Danish modern. But it's all been simply lines and
clean design, I rather dislike ornamentation and filigree.
For inspiration
I'd have to cite an artist, Donald Roller Wilson, and a friend, Leslie
Harpold. Wilson creates these intricate oils depicting cats, dogs and chimps
wearing crowns and dresses and dark glasses in settings reminiscent of
Grimm's fairy tale forests and wrong-side-of-the-tracks boarding rooms with
cigarette butts and gnawed-on pencils flying through the air. The paintings
tell a story in themselves, a continuing ode to whimsy and wishes and
silliness that are nonetheless poignant and engaging. Through his work I've
learned that nothing is so serious that it cannot be fun, and that
everything you do is worth the time and effort to make it the best you can
make it, no matter what it is.
Leslie inspires me
both personally and professionally. She's levelheaded and practical, and at
the same time silly and playful. Her company is called Fearless, and it
suits her to a T. She is that, and I am often filled with fear. I look to
her for strength of character and an understanding of humanity, which often
baffles me. She genuinely likes people and treats everyone the same, a
quality I find hard to master. People disappoint me, and I don't understand
them more often than I get them. The whole George W. thing is a case in
point. The man's an idiot, but apparently half the people in this country
believe he's the best man qualified to be running it. How they reached that
conclusion I'll never know.
How have web designs changed over the last year? Have you seen any
interesting trends or ideas? Sure, there are things like pop-under ads, but
have you seen anything really cool in terms of designs?
Frankly, no. I
think we're living under the tyranny of usability now, which is a result of
the presumed failure of the Web as a tool for anything other than
information delivery.
My own designs are
certainly, to my own eyes, much less adventurous and somewhat awkward and
piecemeal as I attempt to find some common ground between straightforward
accessibility and an aesthetic sense of art and elegance. The web certainly
exceeds at offering a gateway to information, first and foremost. Everything
on a computer - and therefore a computer network - is usually brought down
to database levels. Layers of organized data presented with a graphical
frontend making that depth of information easily available. As such, a
fairly dry and excessively simplistic presentation works best. You have to
organize the chaos into a semblance of uniformity. So designs are becoming
cookie-cutter copies of the same thing over and over. The continuing process
of databasing everything, all the way down to the use of Blogger and
GreyMatter on a personal site level, means that creativity is also encased
in the strict boundaries of the data.
It's been said
since the Web began by many different voices that it would never succeed as
a medium without standard interface rules. And I guess we're getting there
now through accident and circumstance rather than anyone's insistence that
it's the One True Way. And we've all certainly experimented with all sorts
of methods of site organization and navigation, from pop-up nav windows to
sideways-scrolling history-based navs to ones that slide in from the side
and expand to conform, but it all keeps coming back to lists of links on one
side of the page or the other. Images in square boxes. White
backgrounds.
Same as it ever
was.
Strange Brew
Let's be off
the wall. What is the color of the web? What does it smell like? What does
it feel like? Now, with those things in mind, do you like the web?
Sounds like you've
been through a branding exercise once or twice lately. My new role has a lot
of marketing involved in it, and I find it terribly interesting and more
than a little awful. One branding exercise is that you ask your client,
"if your company was sitting across the table from me, who would it
be?" And then you ask them to describe their company as a person.
Often, they start describing their customers and you have to stop them and
say, "no, *who* is your company? Is it a man or a woman? What kind of
car does your company drive? What is your company wearing? Does your company
use any swear words when it talks? Is it so formal that it avoids
abbreviations?" And on and on until you get a picture of the company
and then you define that and it, in turn, defines the style guide for
everything the company does.
But enough of
that.
The Web is black.
Its a huge void waiting to be filled up. In between every page on every site
is endless space waiting for more and more and more. It's a vacuum. It's
neither warm nor cold and has no depth to speak of. It smells like cardboard
and plastic. It's the smell of a new car. It's the smell of the polyform
when you take it off your new Mac. It smells like the future. When you reach
out to touch the Web, it's surprisingly hard. You expect your hand to go
right through it like spider's web or liquid, but your fingers press against
a glossy surface you can't even see. You press harder and it begins to
yield, though not easily.
I love the Web.
Why would you not love the Web? It's everything! It's annoying and amazing
and frustrating and fascinating. It's funny and fucked up and silly and sad.
It lies to you and sucks you off. It caresses you and delivers your dreams.
It's filled with color and magic and games and sex and it's completely ugly
and repulsive and inhumane and pointless. It's everything. What's not to
like?
This is fun. Let's be off the wall again. If the web was a small child,
what would you want to teach it? What would it look like as an adult?
I'd like to teach
it responsibility, but that's only learned through experience. I'd teach it
many languages so more people would get access to more great stuff. I'd
teach it to listen better so it doesn't jump to conclusions quite as
quickly. I'd teach it patience, which would be very hard, and I'd teach it
humility because when it grows up it's going to be more than important to
everyone's daily life, it will be vital.
As an adult, it
doesn't look like anything. It is no longer an entity, something in and of
itself, it has become like air or earth or stardust, part of everything,
connecting everyone, containing the information and the access in the same
breath, through portals plugged into cars and TVs and houses and watches. It
is invisible and ever-present.
Wrap It Up, Baby
What are your
favorite books? Favorite web sites?
I read a lot of
crappy fantasy and sci fi. My friends all read Fastfood Nation and books
translated from German about the life of orchids or some such.
Hyper-intelligent treatises written by Nobel laureates. That or they're
writing their own books and bitching about how hard it is. Me, I eat pop
culture and drink imagination. And I am forlorn at the state of fantasy and
sci fi, lately. Derivative or dopey, mostly, without connection to themes of
life and love and humanity. But I read on and on. I started writing a story
and it sits there on my computer, not developing. It's just an idea at this
point and I am curious to see where it goes. It's how I usually write, start
with a nugget of an idea and see what develops.
I love Guy Gavriel
Kay, his stories are infused with deep emotion and well-rounded characters.
There are always surprises in store and I'm never disappointed with his
work. I enjoy Robin Hobb and Janny Wurts. Their heroes are rarely faultless,
their settings are incredibly detailed and fully realized. Neil Gaiman is
great, as everyone should already know. I'm addicted to Robert Jordan's
Wheel of Time series, although I'm beginning to think it will never end. I
have to admit that I've read all the Harry Potter books and mostly enjoyed
them. Neal Stephenson, Nick Hornby and Douglas Coupland never fail to amuse
and entertain me.
As for Web sites,
I visit a lot of news sites and the occasional Web log, if I find one with
wit and beauty and originality - all of which are defined by the individual
so my list will not likely be anyone else's. I have a few bookmarks, I visit
my friends' sites.
Did I miss anything? Do you have anything else to say? What should every
person remember about this interview?
Nine questions are
just about right. Otherwise I'll just ramble on for pages and pages.
I'll say this,
though, here at the end. If you aren't making something on the Web right
now, you are wasting an opportunity. If you have something inside you and
you need to share it, this is the place to do so. Talk of design and
usability and interface and navigation is beside the point -- and that point
is that nothing matters more than the message.
The message is the
thing you want to tell. The message is that thing you have inside that wants
out, that needs a voice, that has to belong to everyone or it has no power
at all. Everyone has a message. Some people have many of them. Some people's
message changes over time. Some messages fall on deaf ears, but that doesn't
negate the telling.
What's your
message? Who will you tell it to? Will you leave it somewhere for future
generations to discover? Will you write it down, pour it out, dress it up
and give it away? Or will you harbor it inside you, hidden and secret, until
it dies?
Now is the time.
Thank you, Lance. This was an amazing interview.
Editor's Comments
Do you have more
questions for Lance Arthur? What did you think of this interview? What
did I miss? Talk about
it! If we are lucky, maybe Lance will answer your questions. Or,
perhaps he will ask you some questions.
I suggest that you
visit Glassdog. Go there now.
-- John S.
Rhodes
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