1995 Web Site

By 1995 the Web was becoming more robust in the many possibilities available to designers. I was getting more and more interested in it and finally decided to release a real web site around the time that AOL started offering member home pages. This allowed me to experiment without sinking a lot of money or time into the project and, more importantly, it allowed me to do the whole process with my Macintosh.

At first I was going to find and upload the project that I had started the year before, but advancements had been made in the last year that allowed me to make a more attractive web site design, and I decided to start over from scratch to take advantage of transparent GIFs and background colors.

I wanted to do something that was a little easier to use than the catalog that I had created earlier, but I didn't want it to be dry and non-visual. I wanted something cool. I sat down and sketched out several ideas, mostly on paper. I still prefer to sketch out my ideas before I get too far into the process as it keeps a more organic edge to my work that I sometimes lose when I go straight to the computer to formulate my ideas.

Eventually, I settled on the idea of using an old type drawer as the metaphor for the interface. Users would click on the different blocks of type to select the typefaces that they would like to view. This worked pretty well and I got a lot of feedback that people genuinely enjoyed the site, but I also got a few complaints.

I received complaints from Windows users about the site being too dark and unreadable. I had tried to design for both Windows and Macintosh screens, but I missed the mark. My eyes at that time were still pretty young. And because the rest of me was as young as my eyes were, I assumed that everybody could see the same as I could and I didn't give much thought to the idea that my eyesight (even with glasses as thick as coke bottles) was better than most.

I now know that our eyes actually lose visual acuity as we age, with the ability to view light decreasing as the years go by. By the time we are 60 we see only 33% of the light that is visible at the age of 20. (Quoted from Flazoom.com articles: Designing for your eyes only, Chris Macgregor 2001)

Other problems with this design were that even though I had provided a visual feast with relatively small graphics, the thing that I really missed on was in the display of the typefaces. The type display pages only showed a small sampling of the fonts that I had for sale. I had displayed ten upper and ten lower case letters only. My argument at the time was that I wanted to save on download times, but in reality I was so caught up in making a fun interface that the idea that the site should be dedicated to showing my type was almost an afterthought. This sort of unbalanced concern for over-designing the interface was pretty common back then, as everyone was just getting into the Web and nobody really knew yet what should drive the designs or please the visitors, but it's a lesson that shouldn't be overlooked by any designer. Even modern web sites often suffer from "interface first, content second" – the sad note is that these designs can still win awards!

This version was online for a little less than a year, and during that year I managed to redesign little pieces of it as suggestions came in. Eventually I added a group of text links to complement the visual interface for people who had their images turned off, as many did back then to try to get a decent speed out of their connection.

I hadn't even thought of user testing at this time, and therefore didn't do any testing at all outside of asking a couple of people whether they liked it or not. But the feedback that I received during this first year was a pretty good eye-opener to the fact that user testing and feedback could help me become a better designer. With every change that I made, the site got easier to use and I learned more about how a better user interface could allow for more efficient and enjoyable user experience.

From a usability perspective there were a lot of things that could have been improved, but overall I feel this version was a success for the time it was released. There was a lot of content for a user to view and many downloads and freebies to keep them happy. The shortcomings of this site design were the small type images that were used, and the lack of a more standardized and comprehensive navigation scheme.

1995 Electronic Catalog
Usability: the Site Speaks For Itself
1996 Web Site