I just read an article by Yaron Schoen where he says,

“I am about to blow your mind with something life has taught me. Are you ready for this… Design is not Art.”

He goes on to talk about how redesigns of popular sites like Facebook and Twitter do not fit in the category of design, but should be classified as “artist renditions.” And to a degree, I agree with his point. Good designs aim toward functionality as much as they do toward beauty.

I’d love to know the statistics on the reasons people go into design as a career. Is it to make things look better, or is it to make things work better? We all fall on one side of that coin. In order to make something work better, you often have to give up some of the ideals on how it should look. In order to make something look nicer, sometimes you sacrifice functionality. There is a time and place for both approaches, and with enough time, skills, and resources you can narrow that gap between form and function.

When I design I often find myself starting from an Information Architecture point of view (I think this means I fall more on the side of function than form). I like to see all the information on the table in front of me before I begin working. Organization comes before beauty for me. Which is hard. I consider myself a designer, yet struggle more with the actual design of a project more than anything else. I’m also not a developer, that’s just not how I would describe myself. So I stick with “front-end web developer”. It’s understandable enough…

ANYWAY. Function is not the way most people see a site. When you’re talking dollars and cents (or in web terms, time on site and page depth) every second spent looking at a page counts. No matter how well functioning your site may be, you will lose customers within seconds if your site lacks visual appeal. Keeping people on your site for a long time takes great content and functionality. But unless you hook them, you lose them.

So the quest continues. Narrowing the gap between form and function. Pleasing clients with great looking sites. Pleasing brains and search engines with excellent information architecture. Making something beautiful to look at, whether you’re in design view or code view.