So the other day at a party we had a very humorous discussion about something none of us could figure out. It is an every day household item that someone apparently found the need to "invent"... a Wine Stopper.
I mean.. really... who STOPS wine. I say we need more wine. Not something to stop it. And frankly, if you don't like wine enough to drink the whole bottle, share it with a friend. Which is what wine was invented for in the first place! Or, better yet, if you don't like wine enough to drink the bottle down, don't buy it.
But for God's sake, don't STOP your wine.
Apparently there is a whole market out there for people who are stopping wine. Stop the madness! States have gone to all kinds of ends to regulate alcohol, but I want to live in a state where they outlaw wine stoppers. California should do this. They make a lot of wine there right? I would think they would want to encourage wine drinking. They should make it illegal to sell these inhumane devices.
This leads me to the relevant part of this blog post, at least design wise.
We need to stop inventing things that are useless. Useless design is all over the place. I invent useless things all day long that look good, like the snowflake wine stopper above, but have no place in the world (or world wide web for that matter).
I am talking about frivolous design elements. Sometimes these take the form of icons. Other times they are other design elements simply created to look good but don't do anything to increase actual usability.
I have fallen into this trap many, many times. Going to my pile of icons to search for just the perfect icon of an envelope or a printer. And sometimes, these things can help usability. But other times, they simply add to the visual clutter of the page.
One of the best things to come out of the whole Web 2.0 thing has been the simplification of design. Clean pages with meaningful interactivity courtesy of AJAX has really made designing fun AND useful. But I am really starting to feel a rebellious feeling about all these icons. And Web 2.0 sure uses a lot of them. All shiny and reflected and soft and fuzzy.
So I resolve that in a future client design, I am going to challenge myself to do an icon-less page. That means no little pictures, but also no little triangles, tri-dot tidbits, or other random bullets. Maybe it is time for Web 2.1.
One of the things I really took away from my recent trip to South By Southwest was the power of good typography. Old books didn't have the luxury of little icons all over the margin. Yet they existed with such a pure design elegance that is lost from most design today.
It is the same elegance that is contained in most bottles of wine I have had the pleasure to enjoy.
Frivolous icons are like wine stoppers. They stop the elegance. I say, let the elegance flow... and stop the stopping!
