• Apr122007

    Top down design

    Posted by Jay in Design

    This post by Todd Dominey blew my mind. He goes to check out a house for sale that had been featured on the cover of Dwell magazine only to find it’s a piece of junk. The house seems to have been built almost as a prop. No attention to detail and shoddy craftsmanship in every aspect of the house:

    There were misaligned windows, floor tile that extended to the wall and then dropped off into God knows where, and incredibly, a sconce on the wall that had a paper cup for a shade.

    Then to cap it all off, the upper loft-areas were surrounded by a railing made out of steel pipes with a cherry-looking wood top. They looked rather stylish from afar, but upon closer inspection the pipes were garden variety stuff you’d pick up at Home Depot with the barcode stickers still affixed to every pipe.

    This is exactly what gives designers a bad name. Designing only for aesthetics and not for use or accessibility or sustainability. Design starts with the user, not the creator. If it doesn’t work, then nobody will use it. This goes for any aspect of design, whether it’s product design, architecture, or web design. It means not only being able to design something but being able to build it. It’s impossible to do one successfully without the other.

    • Post a Comment 2 Comments

    1. Posted at 3:33 pm on 04/12/07

      Gene

      Wow. You know I think this lends itself to being related to an earlier post. I’ve come across many websites that have been “designed” to include flash elements, most of the time the sites i’m talking about here are 100% flash sites. They look good on the surface, as did this house in the photos but when you actually “use” the website, try to manage content or generally market it, you discover the inherent issues in websites constructed like that.

    2. Posted at 2:38 pm on 06/27/07

      txfhhlyfgd

      Thanks for this site!
      hifue.info

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