Visual design and story telling..

  • Haris Khan 7:19 pm on August 22, 2008 Comments

    This week I had the pleasure to attend An Event Apart design conference. It was a great experience to hear some great presentations and learn new approaches towards design. In next few posts I will try to share all of my experiences.

    Starting off the best presentation of the day one was by Jason Santa Maria who is the Creative Director at Happy Cog studios. It was about “Storytelling by Design”. He had raised a very good point that why the design experience on a Wired in-print magazine is so different then Wired’s web experience. The point was that in-print designers try to set the mood around the content but on the web we lose the esence of story telling and just focus on content. Ironically, I think it should be the other way round as we have more tools and independence on the web. The other issue designers face is that we don’t have the control on the medium. Unlike print where the designer can exactly control the layout web designers are at the mercy of browser type, screen resolution and personal settings.

    A very interesting book site NoOneBelongsHereMoreThanYou.com was shared as a case study for its out of box approach.I agree with Jason that its wonderfully done and it has a very unique approach. The image on the the left is the homepage and you will see that it doesn’t have any traditional elements like About Us or Info rather it has a compelling text which draws you in. Similarly I also liked Jason’s site, which tries to break away from conventional design and take each post as an individual story that’s why you will see different design around each post.

    Great visual design which has a story to tell has been around for many years and its very apparent from the below example of Charles Joseph Minard graphic illustration of Napoleon’s Russian campaign of 1812. If you move from left to right, the design illustrates the size of Napoleon’s army in yellow when he started his march toward Russia and moving from right to left in black you can see the size of his army when he was returning to France. Its amazing to see that how a simple design explains such an dramatic event in history. I think at the end it was just Napoleon and his buddy who reached back.

    Jeffry Zeldman also gave an interesting example of how conflict between design and marketing team can result in a funny situation. RealPlayer wants to be a dominat player in media players but on  Real.com it seems that someone was able to convience the the company to psuh a paid version of realplayer down our throat by making free version very hard to find. Apparently someone wants us to download the paid version only. Nice job!!

    At the end I will also encourage you to viist a design site named Fray.com which has some great visual stories. In my next post I will share some more great snippits on design and in the meanwhile if you know some other great design sites then please share them in comments.

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