ThisIsInspired Magazine

ThisIsInspired will be considering seven principles of Japanese aesthetic design and finding their application web design. These articles give you the principles and a selection of their application in real life and help you clean up a layout or keep the viewer engaged. Starts Monday!

These seven principles of Japanese aesthetics can be applied not only to interior decorating, re-doing a garden or painting with watercolours. Aesthetics is all about beauty – or the appreciation of beauty – but can be, in principle, applied to other forms of communication as well. In web design, they can be applied to accessibility, copywriting and structural semantics, for example.

ThisIsInspired will be exploring each of the 7 principles, providing the basic meaning of each one and how it might be applied to web design, and by extension other visual design as well. I’ll try to dig up examples of practical implementation of each one as well so you can see how it might be put into use yourself. Keep in mind these aren’t hard and fast rules – a principle is something, after all, that can be applied a small amount or in extremes. It’s up to you how the principles will be used.

You may notice that they are largely interconnected, and therefore a balance among them all is necessary. A certain design or client may require more strict use of one principle than another project would. Our creativity comes in play not only in how we use each of them but in how we find our own inspired balance among them all for each project.

This isn’t a course in design theory, so you’re free to translate them however you need to to make them work for yourself.

The 7 Principles

Kanso: Accessibility
Simplicity or elimination of clutter.
The greater incorporation of web standards (thanks, Mr. Zeldman et al) accessibility is becoming easier to incorporate – and it’s true that current methods of developing a website (wider implementation of CSS that separates design from content, for example) greatly boosts overall out-of-the-box accessibility anyway. ThisIsInspired will explain why certain development mantras are so important and explain how this principles might be applied in practical use.

Fukinsei: Holding Interest
Asymmetry or irregularity.
The world would be so much easier if all text was centered and all margins were the same – but it would be a boring world in the end and leave little to now room for creativity and expression. Realistically, even schools of design theory have few hard-and-fast rules for visual layout. The beauty of making creativity functional is finding the balance between it and usability; between creativity and function.

Shibumi: Usability
Beauty in understatement.
Usability is the way a site is navigated. If it’s unusable, the site has low usability. Common usability requirements (if you will) for a website are putting the logo in the top left corner and navigation either on the top of the page or in the left-hand column. Nevertheless, there’s always room for inspiration and our own unique personal touch – within reason.

Shizen: Copywriting & Written Tone
Naturalness.
We don’t realize how important the tone of writing is in web design. Even single-word navigation links can tell a visitor a lot about the overall company, not to mention aiding understanding and navigation of the site itself. Good copyright engages the reader and welcomes him without getting too wordy. It can be instructive without being condescending.

Yugen: Navigation, Page Hierarchy & Unique Processes
Profundity or suggestion rather than revelation.
Content structure goes a lot deeper than the page content and text. The way a site is structured can be a huge boon to the visitor finding what he’s after quickly. Good category hierarchy and well-thought-out wireframes are part of what makes a site well structured and easy to navigate. Similarly, unique processes (a sign up form or a checkout path) benefit from trimming distraction and making the act of navigating through it more natural.

Datsuzoku: Search & Unplanned Navigation
Freedom from habit or formula.
Steve Krug has said there are two kinds of people who visit a website: Search oriented people and Browse oriented people. From search boxes to breadcrumbs, each website can vary a great deal. Searching is the only part of the user’s experience that you cannot pinpoint. You can give him good category names (the browse oriented user), you can give him page structure that’s meaningful (structural semantics) but you can’t nail down every search on a word-by-word basis.

Seijaku: Identity & Sense of Place
Tranquility, stillness, solitude.
Keeping everything in unison – the overall look and feel of the page and ultimately of the whole website – is vital to a user staying longer (enjoying the browsing experience and/or returning later), being more apt to buy (no lack of confidence in the company and less confusion during checkout) and identifying and solidifying a brand.

No Hard & Fast Rules

Again, please keep in mind these are not hard and fast rules (or even hard and fast principles). Each of these principles overlap each other to an extent and can be compared to other aspects of design. For example, the first one – which I’ve applied to accessibility – can also be applied making a shopping cart process better; the fifth one, Navigation, applied here to Hierarchy & Unique Processes, could also be applied making the site more usable. This series of articles is my interpretation as a designer, and how it might benefit you by showing precise examples and implementation of each one.

The first article, explaining accessibility (or Kanso), will be published Monday, and then weekly after that. Look for a new post each Monday – it’ll give you something count and look forward to as well give new readers a chance to find them and share (if they want).

Now you’ve got a goodie to look forward to all weekend. :)