Functional Design

There were two things from Vignelli's lecture that stood out as important for us to consider as web designers.

Firstly, the heckler who interrupted in Joe Wilson/Kanye West-esque fashion unfortunately drew attention away from Vignelli's point about fonts. The reason he said one only really needs four fonts, two with serifs and two sans, was that there are so many other changes you can make to adjust the impact of a font like color, font-weight, font-size and others. If these changes are applied first and in the right ways, the use of more fonts becomes unnecessary and usually, distracting. His reminder that Bordoni is a font that is several hundred years old, and could therefore be said to be implicitly attractive to humans from many ages, was quite illuminating. I am reminded of a Coco Chanel quote: " Fashion fades, only style remains the same" Substitute design for style and you get Vignelli's stance. His insistence that design of an element should be judged by how functional the element would be in 100 years is something more designers should take to heart. Obviously, Vignelli does not design with built-in obsolescence in mind.

This was really Vignelli's second point about design, that if it is not functional, it is not design, is possibly even more pertinent to our design of websites. The web is all about ease of use. Ask someone if they would rather visit an aesthetically pleasing site or a functional one, and they will always pick function.

It was great to see 230 slides of work by a man who has designed in so many different arenas. People are intuitive and creatures of habit. They want things to work the same in all phases of their lives. Our websites are no exception. Let's just hope Massimo doesn't start doing web design.