[Sigia-l] the lesser importance of home pages ->moresplashpagefun?

[Christopher Fahey]

> Design is a holistic process, I flatly refuse to cannibalize 
> it in any shape or form with what are silly titles to me. Design is
problem solving
> (balanced between the client and the user): it's strategy AND 
> structure AND architecture AND interaction AND interface AND graphics AND 
> usability. In my book, there's no OR. So your pitting "graphic designer" 
> against the rest is not something I share at all.

"Design" is a holistic process, but only for those in senior management, far
removed from the actual hands-on practice of design (or for those who think
in broad strokes with little appreciation for implementation details). I
don't exist at such a high plane of existence that I can afford to forget
that without specialization nothing excellent can really ever get done.
Design is like a fractal: Each specialized subdiscipline contains a world of
detail, an infinite space in which both pathetic mediocrity and sublime
excellence are possible. One can claim to be above or beyond these
subdisciplines, but most people live and many even thrive within them. I've
never met a person with the talent, skill, and the time to "design" every
tiny aspect of a large-scale user experience. Yes, graphic design is a
subset of some kind of ephemeral holistic concept of "design", in a "Steve
Jobs is a Designer" sense of the word. Even a micromanager
superperfectionist like Stanley Kubrick didn't actually build the sets of
2001: A Space Odyssey.

Anyway, if you re-read my posts, you'll see that I did no "pitting" at all,
and never said that anything was more important than anything else. I just
said that a skilled graphic designer could help that McMaster site. You seem
to think that some sort of a holistic designer would help the site, and you
may well be right. But a good, skilled graphic designer would still be a
good idea as well.

Cheers,
-Cf