The Art of Business: The Bold and the Beautiful

Eric J. Adams

Read this short excerpt:
Esquire magazine designer Helmut Krone… greatly admired the work of legendary American designer Paul Rand. Krone surrounded his workspace with pictures of Rand designs. Louis Dansiger, a fellow designer and colleague, advised Krone, “If you want to be as good as Rand, don’t look at Rand; look at what Rand looks at.”
That’s one of many anecdotal gems in the new design book Hot-Wiring Your Creative Process: Strategies for Print and New Media Designers, by Curt Cloninger. The book can be excessively theoretical, but only rarely. Mostly, it unveils design ideas and strategies with great visual examples and text that is a pleasure to read.
Now compare the above excerpt to this one:
Color coding of [Web site] sections is a very good idea — as long as you don’t count on everyone noticing it. Some people (roughly 1 out of 200 women and 1 out of 12 men — particularly over the age of 40) simply can’t detect some color distinctions because of color-blindness. More importantly, from what I’ve observed, a much larger percentage (perhaps as many as half) just aren’t very aware of color coding in any useful way. Color is great as an additional cue, but you should never rely on it as the only cue.
This second excerpt is from Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, by Steve Krug. This book defines the word “practical.” Krug is a master at looking at Web design from the user’s point of view and turning the knowledge around into practical tips for Web designers. There isn’t a Web designer that shouldn’t run out and buy this book immediately.
The crux here is that these two books are so different — one strategic and philosophical, the second practical and utilitarian — yet both are engaging and valuable reads. These are the two best design books to cross my desk this past year.

Hot-Wiring Your Creative Process
This book is touted as an exploration of design philosophy, but that would be the wrong way to characterize it. Call it an exploration of creative strategies, design principles, and efficient work habits.
Take, for example, Chapter 9, “The Five Realms of Designs.” Sounds fairly esoteric, doesn’t it? But Cloninger’s five realms are things we should all think about: media constraints, audience needs, client needs, professional ethics, and aesthetics.
He spends a few pages on each, starting with a fairly high-level view and then drilling down into each realm with practical ideas for working within the parameters.
He also talks about software and systems and the critical role they play in the design process. Designers often feel threatened by systems and software, but the truly creative designer shouldn’t fear software. Increased automation, argues Cloninger, is actually good for the design industry.
In Hot-Wiring, Cloninger uses a wide variety of illustrations and photos, from 20th-century French philosophy to medieval manuscripts to punk rock posters and more. The book is sprinkled with interviews of designers, including the omnipresent Clement Mok. While the interviews are instructive, the book is at its best when Cloninger is on his own, providing a fresh approach to design and design strategies.
All of Cloninger’s strategies are built on a single premise outlined in the first chapter of the book:
Life is too short to keep cranking out mediocre crap. Ask any commercial designer, “Why did you get into design?” And none of them are going to answer, “I got into it so I could crank out mediocre crap.”
Hot-Wiring is a great first step to leaving mediocrity behind.
Don’t Make Me Think
The best thing about this book is that it’s fun, it’s playful, it’s real, it unabashed, it’s useful. Okay, that’s five things, but you get the idea. The book is built on the concept that Web usability is not just good design, but common courtesy. Designers who care more about the aesthetics of their designs than anything else are doing nobody any favors, least of all their clients.
The book (now in its second edition with three new chapters) is divided into four sections:

• Guiding principles
• Things you need to get right
• Making sure you got them right
• Larger concerns and outside influences.

Each section contains two to five chapters. My favorite is “Animal, Vegetable, or Mineral: Why users like mindless choices.”
In that chapter, Krug offers this little truism: Users don’t mind a lot of clicks as long as each click is painless and they have continued confidence that they’re on the right track. The rule of thumb might be something like “three mindless, unambiguous clicks equal one click that requires thought.”
You may agree or disagree, but Krug’s example is right on the money. For example, how many times have you been given the following choice:
{u}Home
Office{/u}
What if you work from a home office? Then this frustrating choice does little to engender good will. And as Krug points out, “we face choices all the time on the Web, and making the choices mindless is one of the main things that make a site easy to use.”
In addition to a wealth of design tips, Krug tackles a subject rarely handled well in Web books — writing for Web sites. His quick conclusion: “Happy talk and instructions must die.”
He takes a 103-word sample from a Web site and reduces it to 41 words without any loss of clarity. Designers aren’t often asked to write Web copy, but they must deal with bulky verbiage all the time. And Krug’s instructions should memorized by every Web writer around.
Perhaps the best chapters of the book deal with usability testing, the most valuable of which is “Usability Testing on 10 Cents a Day.” Krug spent almost twenty years making software and Web sites easier to use at companies like Apple, Netscape, AOL, Lexus, and BarnesandNoble.com. In this book, he provides a lot of easy, practical, and cheap ways of testing. And he shows how to spend $300 or less on usability testing to arrive at results comparable to testing that routinely costs companies $5,000 to $15,000. The book is worth the price for these chapters alone.
Krug’s book is colorful and bold. Cloninger’s is sublime and muted. Together, they’re proof that design — and design books — can vary widely and still get the job done.