Sep
27
0

Designing by Function Over Form

Author Ryan    Category Uncategorized     Tags ,

A little over a year ago, Andrea and I finally were able to close on a house in one of central Phoenix’ historic districts. Along the journey, we stumbled upon a couple of modern houses designed by the architect, Ralph Haver. After walking through and experiencing some of the noteworthy aspects of the houses, we kind of started having this love affair with modern architecture. Well I did at least… Andrea said she had always been a fan.

That being said, and for some odd reason, I began thinking about and researching modern architecture last night after Andrea fell asleep. What was the purpose? What was the benefit?.. and after an hour or so, I realized above all else, adherence to the idea that functionality over form was the primary rule of thumb great architects like Frank Lloyd Wright and Richard Neutra pushed themselves (possibly not knowingly) to design to. Function over form… it is an interesting concept, but I think a very important one to this day. When typed into a Google image search, two primary things pop up: buildings and cars. That makes total sense… but what about the design element as a part of other less obvious things, like web design?

Today, as I try to piece together the influence of function over form in the online design realm, and as you might already have guessed, the impact of modernism has played a hugely important role in web design and site architecture.

Long gone are the days when we had singular pages with centered text and centered images. From animated gifs, to scrolling marquees, and flashing titles… early pages were incredibly eye catching, but totally useless when it came to functionality. Why spread your content on multiple pages when you can have just one very long page?

This didn’t last though. As websites grew into bigger and bigger entities, the role of functionality and usability started to become a major issue. Bring on the internet’s industrial revolution! Sites like Amazon.com and Ebay, just to name a few, began utilizing a form of navigation allowing users the capability to leverage universal navigation panes to get to different pieces of content/products with just a single mouse click (or two). Ever since, designers and developers have been utilizing technologies to hone in and improve upon design standards to create the easiest, fastest, and most flexible form of displaying information on a rectangular screen. Function over form? I think so, but we’ve trained ourselves to be more accepting of functionality since we don’t really have a vested need to make pretty what it is that we own… like houses, buildings, or cars.

With the modernist approach to web design we have already encountered and continue to use today, its important to understand that this process will never end. As new mediums of display and access to content evolve, so will the ways in which we need to display it. Personally speaking, I think the page design that we are so used to (image above) is getting old and dated! Is there a new and improved way that we can display data that doesn’t look like 2, 3, or 4 rectangles on top of a big rectangle? Or does that sound like blasphemy? I suppose its all about the process of turning art into functionality. Don’t forget about that little thing called search engine optimization.

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