Designing for Interactivity

2:27am Sunday 15th of November, 2009

Four or five years ago I used a graphic metaphor as the backdrop of my website which suggested that I'm different to all the other web developers out there - that somehow what I created was a little more advanced, a little more 'real' (I guess there was a young marketer in me after all).

Ironically, this point was illustrated using an array of space ships, which at the time proved easy to render using 3D Studio Max and serviced the need to illustrate some sort of superiority through colour manipulation (using different materials & basic lighting in 3DS Max).

So with that as my epitaph from my beloved 2004 website I think I might finally put it into practise. And I might begin with the visual representation of websites.

I have a problem with screenshots of a website, especially if they're used in a portfolio. To reduce a website (that is, a truly interactive website) to some sort of instantaneousity is remarkably myopic; yet nearly every portfolio site I've seen uses carefully cropped screen grabs of their web productions.

Some slightly more clever designers will alter the screen-grab to give it a 3D perspective albeit without understanding their own message in doing so. The faux-3D effect is suggestive of there being more than what meets the eye - and if you think about it, any 3D object viewed from a single perspective (such as in a 2-dimensional image) inherently suffers a great deal of omission.

So this manipulation that the more savvy designers use can be thought of as a step in the right direction h it's a fair representation of the idea that there's more around the corner (or behind, or on the side, etc.). But it also suggests that these out-of-view components are heterogeneous; that it's just more content that's contained in the actual production that is outside the field-of-view; an idea that is hardly true.

It's important to remember that websites are mixed-medium. That 'more' lurking out of your field-of-view isn't just more writing, but it's also more images, more video, more sound, more buttons, links, animations, server & database communication, interactivity, commentary and links.

So watch this space- I plan to better translate the medium of a website to the artefact of an illustration to suggest that a website is indeed information that has been organized and structured; but done so interactively, using a carousel of different technologies.

It'll certainly be different to a typical screen grab; but I might suggest that it'll a little more 'real', i.e. representative of the truth.