It’s been a while since I’ve read Boxes and Arrows, it’s a very good collaborative blog about information architechture and related jiggery pokery. One thing caught my eye today:
Dogmas Are Meant to be Broken: An Interview with Eric Reiss
It’s a set of ‘rules’ for web design in the spirit of Lars Von Trier’s Dogma Manifesto.
My first thought was that it was going to be a load of luddite nonsense that would get in the way of innovation and advancement. But then I saw this and was encouraged:
The trick with doing a dogma for the web was to avoid the “rules syndrome†(For example, Links should be blue.) for best practices that were liable to change as technology changed. How do you do a set of rules or guidelines that would prove helpful despite the technological advances and would also be relevant as fashion changes?
Cool, I thought. Then I saw the manifesto and thought doublepluscool:
Web Dogma ‘06
- Anything that exists only to satisfy the internal politics of the site owner must be eliminated.
- Anything that exists only to satisfy the ego of the designer must be eliminated.
- Anything that is irrelevant within the context of the page must be eliminated.
- Any feature or technique that reduces the visitor’s ability to navigate freely must be reworked or eliminated.
- Any interactive object that forces the visitor to guess its meaning must be reworked or eliminated.
- No software, apart from the browser itself, must be required to get the site to work correctly.
- Content must be readable first, printable second, downloadable third.
- Usability must never be sacrificed for the sake of a style guide.
- No visitor must be forced to register or surrender personal data unless the site owner is unable to provide a service or complete a transaction without it.
- Break any of these rules sooner than do anything outright barbarous.
For a fuller explanation of each of the points visit: Dogmas Are Meant to be Broken: An Interview with Eric Reiss
Hi Iain,
I thought that you may be interested in 8vo on the outside by Hamish Muir and Mark Holt who come to similar types of conclusions as they worked on a range of design projects for clients from American Express to Factory Records.
Best regards,
Ged