Spotlight: Frank Chimero via Responsive Web Design

I really like Frank’s insights into the web as a medium. This podcast is no different. Around minute mark 18 though, it gets really interesting.

Ethan asks him the following question:

in some ways you’re sort of trying to frame what a web native aesthetic might be in general for web design...I’d love to hear a little bit more about that, Frank, and just generally how you think about what the web needs as a design medium

I’ve just pulled the entire transcript at that point, because I think everything Frank says is worth pondering (emphasis mine):

One of the reasons that I think so much about what websites should look like, not just in specific terms like, “Oh, I have this client. What should their website look like?” but just in general, what should the experience of going from website to website feel like, it’s mostly grounded in the fact that I sort of see web designers repeating things that we’ve labeled as mistakes before. We did a lot of work...trying to iterate to people the importance of semantics and accessibility on websites, and the benefit to users of having consistent experiences across those website and having those experiences be driven by the interactivity of the browser, right? That’s why Flash websites weren’t so great, because every time you hit a Flash website, you didn’t know how to use it. I see us sort of repeating that at this point. There are sort of these marquee websites that are obviously for marketing but there’s a lot of whizzbangery around it because they’re meant to draw attention. But they have some of those fundamental usability problems that I think those early Flash websites had, and it’s really hard for me to look at them and not see them as cumbersome and bloated—and cool, but I find myself looking at them more than actually using them. Maybe that’s the intent, I’m not really sure.

So, that’s kind of one of the reasons why I was like is there an oughtness?...Is there a way towards making websites that feel like they’re websites? I have a pretty good feeling about what that is and it doesn’t necessarily overlap too much with the whizzbangery that gets a lot of attention. So, wanting to really drill down and say, well, okay, what’s the web’s grain? Well, the web kind of wants you to stack things vertically on top of each other and have quite a bit of text. It wants to be fluid, it wants to scroll vertically, and it wants to probably use flat colors or simple gradients because that’s what’s easy to specify inside of CSS, and also you can take those aesthetic rules and stretch them out to boxes of indeterminate shape or boxes that might change shape based on how somebody’s accessing the website or how much content is sitting inside of that box. So, it’s like what is the aesthetics of fluidity? That’s really what the main question is, and a lot of it is dictated by what the tools make easy for you to do.

So, I think that you can make a perfectly great and serviceable website probably with just, I don’t know, 100 to 150 lines of CSS. It doesn’t take really that much. It doesn’t take a lot of JavaScript or anything like that. The old websites from the 90’s, they still work, their fonts just need to be a little bit bigger and they need to set a max width on their paragraph so it has a nice measure. Other than that, you go back and look at a bunch of the essays by Tim Berners-Lee and you’re like, “Actually, this still holds up. I’m not a big fan that it’s in Times New Roman, but that’s what they had to work with.”

So, that’s what’s interesting to me. It’s taking sort of a principled stance as a starting point, honoring the materials that you’re working with and believing that the web has a grain like how a piece of wood has a grain. You can work against that grain, and that creates interesting work that requires a lot of craftsmanship, but for the most part, if you’re building something, you’re going to want to go with the grain because it’s going to be sturdier, it’s going to be easier for you to work with and typically, hopefully, in the process it will be a little bit more beautiful, too.

We had a conversation about web fonts mostly in that, from a kilobyte perspective, they’re pretty pricey, and there’s all of these logistics to worry about if you want a performant website, about how they load and if you want the flash of unstyled text or using JavaScript to put conditional classes on bodies to change the body font after the fonts load and those sorts of things. My question was just sort of like, well, that’s really easy for other people, but every additional step that they need to take is an extra point of fragility, right? So, I’m just sort of wondering is it worth the effort.

Right now, my website is using two typefaces, one is called Fakt and the other one is called Arnhem, and the fallback immediately after that is San Francisco and Georgia. If I take out the web fonts, I like it nearly as much as if I had the web fonts in there. The vibe of the site changes a little bit, but for the most part most of the typefaces are of the same size, so it isn’t like a world of difference changing the typeface to these fallbacks. So it’s like, well, do I actually need those typefaces in there, or would it just be easier and more stable to have those system fonts being used? I kind of waffle on it, I go back and forth probably every single day, and I decided to leave them in because I was like, well, I bought them, let’s use them. But it is sort of like this interesting question whether these additional assets, what the trade-off for each one of these is. Because every additional element you add to a web page, it costs something, you know? It benefits in some way, but it also costs something, and eventually you’ve got to justify the cost, because we can’t communicate the size of web pages before they’re loaded.