27 April 2009

Here’s Sam Brown writing about the newer 37signals website, offering a little a:hover CSS to improve their site:

The boys at 37signals have clearly forgotten they are designing for an interactive medium and have instead redesigned with a great looking site that’s about as flat and static as you can get.

Now, Sam is a really great web designer, but take heed, don’t believe a word he says! (Sorry Sam, but this is too good a springboard for my own rant.)

“Interactive medium” is a very misleading and stupid category. What is interactive and what is not interactive? We interact via mouse and keyboard with websites and computer software. When reading a printed magazine we interactively flip the pages to read the next page. When someone hands us their business card, we interact with it by putting it in our rolodex or in the trash can. We interact with food labels and t-shirt graphics and billboards. Tell me, what is not an interactive design medium?

Maybe he just meant that it’d help users understand which text are links. But probably not. Links on 37signal’s website are underlined which help you understand they are links before you put your cursor over the text, and then when you do, your cursor turns into the standard pointing-finger hand, as expected.

What he’s really saying is that he just thinks it would look a lot better — and that this is an interactive design medium that can also involve cool context-sensitive graphic changes that might enhance the look or feel of the design. And that’s fine. Sometimes making elements change shape or color is a great idea. (I use this technique on my own website.)

But let’s not suggest that it’s necessary to make things change on touch for interactivity’s sake. And let’s not suggest that the web is the only interactive design medium.