Is design perfectionism possible on the web?
I still remember back in design school, one of the very first lessons we learned during a cut paper project was that professional designers are anal-retentive perfectionists. When we mounted work, it had to be perfect. Our mat board couldn't have any tears, our printouts were cut with a metal ruler and exacto blade, our sheets centred perfectly on the board (measured two or three times). No knicks, scratches or glue bubbles were permissible on the project.
This lesson was beaten into us (not literally, most of the time) for a reason: We had to give a shit about our work. If we were that obsessive about just mounting a printout to hand in to our instructors, we should be even more attentive with work that the world would see. The kerning of letters had to be adjusted just so. The spelling had to be accurate. Things that were supposed to align had to align precisely.
If you were to lurch behind a good designer and watch him or her work, you'd probably see him moving objects on the screen pixel by pixel with the arrow key, fine-tuning the typography, or sliding the opacity of a background up and down until it looks right. That's great. That's what good designers do.
However, there's a problem - the web doesn't work like that. Web designers know this, and have learned to embrace the seeming limitations of the medium. Browsers vary in size, resolution, dimensions, colour calibration, type rendering and screen orientation - even more true in the era of tablets and smartphones. Responsive design has pretty much dealt a death blow to old-fashioned fixed pixel designs, allowing our websites to scale and adapt to any screen width - a very smart move considering even iPhones and iPads now have different lengths and widths among themselves, such as the iPad mini and iPhone 5.
But with this embracing of fluidity and flexibility, have web designers lost that anal-retentive attention to detail that is so respected in the craft of design?
A recent development project reminded me of this. Our client passed us a long list of edits that were very minute, consisting largely of terminology reserved for print design, such as point size and PMS colours. The client clearly and admittedly wasn't used to working on the web. That's OK, and we did our best to comply with the changes and also educate them about medium specific units and colour values.
It got me thinking about how much things have changed for us web designers. Have we lost our edge? Should we be more obsessive over our designs, worrying about such things as a slight variation in colour, the way a font renders a certain punctuation mark, or the difference of a couple pixels? A pixel is almost invisible to the human eye. To put it in perspective, take an iPad 3 screen and visually divide it in your mind into 3 million little squares. One of those squares is a pixel.
I personally don't think it's bad that web designers have gotten over this obsessive quality. I think there are certain things worth putting a lot of effort into. I think it's great that you can spend your time in Photoshop or Fireworks as a designer, tweaking and playing with alignment, contrast, typography and texture. But eventually it's time to let the little bird out to fly, and once it's out there you can't control every aspect of how it looks. I think it's a much more worthwhile use of one's time to instead spend the effort in planning for variations in screen size and creating a flexible, adaptive or responsive framework that will enable the design to look great depending on the context it's viewed in.
I'm aware that Steve Jobs was a proud perfectionist and would throw fits of rage if the colour of paint in one of his factories was slightly off from what he wanted. That was him. He had the privilege of being Steve Jobs, but that is not a realistic standard to hold the average working designer to. The web moves too fast to afford perfectionism, and I think iterative design approaches have proven more effective in the majority of cases. Build a good system with ultimate flexibility, get it out there, test and tweak it as you go. Design changes that enhance the experience, usability or conversion are ultimately more important than massaging our egos.
But that's just me. What do you think - has the pendulum swung too far in the other direction, or has design perfectionism lost its relevancy?
