Reviving Wisteria

Sometimes I look around and I hate what the web has become.

Years and years ago when I first came to the web, back in the mid nineties, my favorite website was called “Wisteria”. It was a whimsical, beautiful, personal website that explored mythology, fairytales, kitchen magic (homemade cosmetics and organic cleaning supplies, etc.) gardening, and things that go bump in the night. It was disastrously organized, if it was organized at all. If you were lucky enough to find a useful piece of information during one visit, you had to memorize it or write it down because chances were good you’d never find that information again. Clicking a wrong link during a mosey down one of her recipes for herbal lip balms would land you on a page about her chickens (complete with pictures and a haiku, of course), which would in turn take you to a page about roaming chicken coops and a recipe for a three egg omelet. I could rarely remember where my journey had begun, and it was a hopeless task to go to her site to look for anything in particular, but every visit was such a wonder that I came back eagerly and often to see what she was up to.

She updated her site frequently, though in unexpected places. Some days I was sure the third link in her “Ode to a Lavender Fairy” used to take me to a tutorial on watercolor, only to discover it now took me to her webcam. But every update added a new dimension of whimsy and beauty to the site. The art was carefully chosen, the language delightfully sweet. The photography, while not professional, was worthy of the words that surrounded it — the pictures told as much of a story as anything else.

I didn’t just visit her website. I explored it. I relished its quirks. I looked forward to old paths leading me to new places, and just accepting it when old favorites disappeared to be replaced by her new fancy-of-the-moment.

Wisteria’s site was a treasure hunt, and I miss that about the web. I miss how personal it used to be before it was taken over by bizpeak and advertisers. I miss how free it was, how open to exploration and unfolding. Webapps are great and everything, but as a publishing platform the web used to be — and could be again — so much more. Don’t get me wrong, I recognize the value of a strong architecture, of solid navigation, and of good usability and predictability. But I also understand the value of a website as art, and of art as experience, and what it means to get lost in one’s journey into images, words, ideas. The value of these things might be harder to quantify, and certainly harder to justify to a client or a company, and truthfully, these things that I hold so dear won’t be of value to many people. It will depend on the right situation, the right website, the right visitor. But these people, these instances, should be catered to as well. There’s no reason the web has to be sterile, blue-gray, and plastic.

Damn it all. I’m going to bring Wisteria back.

Visual Media Storytellers

Political correctness finds little love with me, a fact that becomes immediately — and often uncomfortably — evident to anyone who works with me on a project. I prefer to present the world as I see it, idiosyncrasies and all, and let what I see as truth speak for itself. Honest, open design speaks louder than any self-conscious, fearful design ever could, and I am known for nothing if not being outspoken, occasionally to my own detriment.

To wit, when designing a new site for the School of Journalism at UT Austin, I incorporated the infamous image of OJ Simpson at his trial with his hand in an ill-fitting glove. I saw no harm in the image, but immediately after we went live, our office received a handful emails about the image’s “potential offensiveness to the black community”. I dismissed the criticism out of hand, since I, as a black designer myself, didn’t find the image in any way derogatory or even provocative.

Nevertheless, our office opted to launch an extensive redesign investigation under the euphemism of “user-testing” to determine whether by-and-large the site was tasteful and inoffensive.

One subject of the user testing, a black woman, was specifically asked if she was offended by my use of the OJ Simpson image. The reviewer shook her head. “Not at all,” she said, “but I will be if you take it down.” After a chuckle she added, “But I do wonder…I mean, it’s not really a great news event. It was more a sensationalist media story.”

She was right, of course, but art direction for the website was not, in fact, great news events; the art direction was great news stories. The difference might seem semantic or negligible to some, but the difference is important. The event of Nicole Brown Simpson’s murder was not culturally significant — women are murdered every day in this country, and not a moment of news time is dedicated to these events. But the story of her death is quite significant not because a celebrity was accused of her murder but because of the way our entire society participated in the story’s creation. We watched the cop cars chase OJ’s truck down the highway. We watched OJ try on the ill-fitting glove before the jury. We stood around office coolers and whispered about whether Mark Fuhrman was really a racist cop and whether evidence had been planted. And we gathered around our television sets, glued to the screen, waiting for the jury’s verdict. The event itself was insignificant, but the stories we wove around that common event, with the vast help of the diligent media, aren’t.

The media takes events, both significant and not, weaves them into the fabric of our culture, and we allow those events to become stories in our lives. We let those narratives become intermingled with our own, such that the otherwise irrelevant goings-on of strangers become important stories in our own mythologies. People remember precisely what they were doing when JFK was shot. We remember the reactions of those around us when OJ was acquitted. While the president’s assassination is certainly more culturally relevant than the OJ murder case, neither of these events would have so impacted us as a society were it not for the clever voices of the media. For better or for worse, we are manipulated by the emotive stories, the evocative images, and the cloying speeches of those who would bend our ear (and our dollar, and our vote) to their narrative.

Insignificant events, when relayed by the increasingly creative and manipulative media, become cultural stories. They become memes that are passed from person to person, from generation to generation, etching themselves upon our shared, cultural memory. These stories are what create our collective history. More than a collection of supreme court cases and presidential tenures taught in high school US history classes, history is shaped by the everyday lives of everyday people, and that includes the advertisements they published and read, the packaging they illustrated, the book jackets they designed and enjoyed. We weave these visual building blocks positioned securely at the cornerstones of our culture into an overarching story that penetrates each individual on many levels. 

We designers may not think of ourselves as storytellers, but we are. Every item we create, every problem we solve, every visual artifact that we leave behind is imprinted upon human memory. We, like so many artists and writers that have gone before us, are powerful people. Each one of us who turns an item or image into a symbol and sets that symbol before our collective eyes tells a story, and that story becomes history, mythology. And because of this, we need to think very carefully about the stories our work is telling. 

In the movie Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal Lecter tells Agent Starling that “we covet what we see every day.” Every fledgling advertiser knows this. Ad designers inundate us with larger-than-life images, and before long we find ourselves lusting after myriad items we don’t need and that won’t make our lives better. But one doesn’t have to be an ad designer to harness the power of provocative imagery. Though perhaps more subtle, every visual designer, from the web designer to the book designer to the fashion designer, has the opportunity to influence the viewing public by weaving stories from cultural symbols, by carefully manipulating the narrative we present.

Because of our immense power to influence, designers have an obligation to the cultures we serve and create. The symbols that we portray are affected not only by the connotations the viewer already has about them, but also by the context in which those symbols are presented. Journalists know this — this is how they are able to take an insignificant occurrence and turn it into a front-page headline. So how do we take the seemingly insignificant — the balding clerk, the fat housewife, the pregnant teenager — and incorporate these images into mainstream media in everyday circumstances? How do we, in other words, take these throw-away symbols and make them into cultural stories?

The dangers in working with unglamorous imagery are sensationalism and romanticism. Nobody is served by presenting the unseen in alluring, unrealistic ways. Even positive stereotypes can be damaging, for stereotypes are necessarily flat — they lack substance, heart, reality. Robbing a subject of the flaws and foibles that root it in the real world isn’t our goal as designers. The goal is to uncover these images and symbols and to reveal them in a way that encourages people to want to look. We’ve been so conditioned to only want to look at that which is slender, sleek, beautiful, hip. We’re not schooled to look at the average, to really consider it for what it is. And on the occasion where we are asked to look at something ugly, it is often presented in a diffused, romanticized light. Some things are simply ugly, but their ugliness does not negate their value. There is a real danger in the designer’s or media’s encouragement of a homogeneous standard of beauty because it pushes the great majority of us — and of life — into the wings to be ignored. It devalues us. It belittles us. We become invisible.

We covet what we see every day, and those of us in the business of designing and determining what our culture sees every day are in a commanding position. But how many of us are rising to the challenge? How many of us are using our skills and positions to contest how things are, and encourage what could be? Are enough designers fighting the good ethical fight to sway our culture toward a larger vision of beauty, or even better, toward unveiling what is real and significant, beautiful or not?

Intuitively, people know what is important. We, like the reviewer at the beginning of this paper, can recognize sensationalism for what it is. How much more would we benefit as a culture if we filled our eyes with reality — with our neighbors, our pastimes, our quotidian trials? How much more connected would we feel if we saw ourselves and our lives reflected in beautifully laid out magazine spreads? In the movie Thirteen Going on Thirty, the film’s heroine, a fashion magazine editor, unveils a storyboard for her proposed redesign of the failing magazine. But to underscore how far fashion has fallen from reality, she displays images all too familiar to anyone who has seen a magazine ad — airbrushed, anorexic models with large eyes and sunken cheeks dressed in clothing no real human could ever wear posed in some improbable situation with eyes partially closed, lips pouty or otherwise slightly parted. And she asks the company’s creative team, “Who are these women? Does anyone know? I don’t recognize any of them.”

The images that we are accustomed to seeing in posh ads and on glossy pages aren’t the people we know and love. As the movie’s protagonist goes on to explain that she wants to see her “best friend’s big sister…and the girls from the soccer team. [Her] next-door neighbor” in the pages of a magazine, we are left to think about the images that we see every day, and how far removed from life those images truly are.

What do we see every day? And how is it presented? How can we do better, bringing richness and authenticity to our work and to our cultures? How can we add meaning to our lives by infusing our visual, cultural stories with big sisters, school principals, and next-door neighbors? The way forward is clear — we have only to be daring enough to begin the journey. It isn’t too late for us to reclaim visual storytelling’s place in reality, to begin leaving a better, more interesting visual history for the generations to come.

Making Love on the Web

How do you make love on the web?

I know how to make love with books. Books are conspicuously sensual. Pages have texture, smell. There is a delightful satisfaction that comes from the feel of turning pages, the way the pages whisper and rustle when moved. Intimacy is easily established with a book, for I can easily take my book to private settings like my bathtub or under a tree and be enveloped in the sensory experience that is reading a book. I touch it. I smell it. I move deliberately from one page to another, forward and backward with ease, skipping chapters, searching for endnotes. I fill the areas the author has left untouched with my own thoughts and questions, finding within the text a space for myself. Reading is transformative and deeply intimate. This is a whole person experience: all of me is engaged. Not just my mind, but my heart and character. This is perhaps the essence of interactive experience.

But my experience with the web is necessarily different. All of my senses are not stimulated. As my friend Chris points out, the internet is inherently cold and distant. I am not holding a collection of yellowed papers that have been handled by countless other people through time. There is little connection between me and whatever it is I’m reading, which is why interaction design online is so important. The re-creation of a feeling of intimacy and involvement, however superficial, is an important aspect of bringing the human element into the online experience.

Creating Intimacy Online

But interaction design alone isn’t enough. In order to bring intimacy to the web, those of us in charge of designing web experiences have to think very carefully about the emotions people feel when engaged with things they love. We have to choose our words carefully, crafting sentences and paragraphs that read well, that fill the reader with some kind of emotion rather than merely feeding him information. We have to take him on a journey, to show him something of ourselves. Our job is even more difficult than that of the book author, because we have to create the feeling of intimacy that automatically comes from the interaction with a physical book. It is no small task, but it lies at the heart of immersive design.

Our task as visual designers is no different: visual design has to aid the user’s immersion in his experience. We do this by understanding and properly using cultural symbols, mythologies, metaphors and histories. We choose colors and shapes that mean something, not merely random combinations that look good. We choose artistic styles that align with the tone of the narrative we’re crafting. The design elements that go into a page’s construction have connotations and histories of their own, and they convey messages to our viewers whether we mean for them to or not. Part of our job as designers is to be familiar enough with the culture we’re speaking to and of to make thoughtful, intelligent, meaningful decisions about the images we portray, lest we run the risk of sending confused, contradictory messages to the user.

Case Study: Journalism

When the UT Journalism site went live, I received a little bit of flak from someone who didn’t think my use of the OJ Simpson image was appropriate. He was concerned that the image might be offensive to the black community. Neverminding the fact that I, as a black designer, chose the image deliberately without any compunction whatsoever, I was sort of taken aback that anyone would take ethical issue with this particular design decision. The art direction for this site was the great news stories of our time. Whatever we might think of the OJ Simpson murder trial fiasco, it was all over the news; it was inescapable. Anyone with a television set living in America during that trial has incorporated the images and narrative of that story into their lives. Images of OJ are meaningful on a fundamental, emotional level. We remember that story. We have opinions about it. What kind of designer would I be if I intentionally left that image out when it so poignantly fits the narrative and speaks to us on such a visceral level?

On the other hand, there is an image that I did intentionally, and conspicuously, leave out. There isn’t an image of World War II or Hitler anywhere. I debated this decision for a long while, but I finally determined that the associations of Hitler were too strong and too negative to serve on a college department website. As a designer, I also have obligations to create and protect the brand of the college and its departments, and in instances where those obligations conflict with my obligations as storyteller, I have to determine which is more important. In this case, I decided that rather than show Hitler, I could imply Hitler. I chose an image of Jesse Owens on the stage bearing his medal at the 1936 Olympics. Viewers who are familiar with history will see the image and incorporate its associations; I don’t have to spoon-feed it to them. Subtle design is often a wonderful way to provide intimacy: whispering a message and allowing the viewer to interpret it is sometimes the best way to continue a narrative.

Deliberate, careful construction of text and imagery is the first step towards making love on the web. We begin by building mythologies with the symbols and histories we already have, and invite the user to fill in the holes with his own experiences and comments. This is one reason that Web 2.0 is so fundamentally important: it allows users and creators to communicate and share, contributing to a reformation of the lost intimacy caused by the new medium. It’s a start but it isn’t enough. The medium itself will never be as intimate as physical media and perhaps we can’t change that; what we can change, however, is our approach to digital media creation. We have to allow ourselves to be artistically engaged in our work.

More on that will have to wait for another post.

Design Theory 101: Emotion and Experience

Designers are fond of saying that we are problem solvers: we recognize real, human needs and create appropriate solutions. We needed a place to rest our bones; designers created the armchair. We needed a way to comfortably drink our hot beverages; designers concocted the coffee mug. But great designers are more than problem solvers: they’re matchmakers. Great designers initiate relationships, and command from us a mysterious loyalty. We participate in these relationships every day in our love affairs with our iPods, Levis, and Dyson vacuum cleaners.

Web design is a curious beast because it is still developing; its still very much in its infancy. And problematically, many ideas about web design are myopic: they want to make web designers little more than desktop publishers, maybe something like interactive graphic artists. But web design isn’t merely a collection of pretty backgrounds, Flash animations and some navigation. Web design is what happens when a solution, a purpose, a delightful experience artfully emerge from the elegant marriage of content (in headers, body copy, footers, etc.) and graphic art. Design is the carefully constructed relationship between the visual elements of a page, the content or information delivered, and the emotional connection established between the user and the site. Design is not merely seen, but experienced.

Deliberateness and Experience

The central tenet of design is deliberateness: nothing exists without reason. An appealing form without function is simply decoration, a pitfall many fledgling designers fall into. Each component of a thoughtful design contributes to the unfolding of a narrative: it implies connections with other pieces of history, of culture, of personal experience. The heart of a user’s experience lies in his own interpretation of what he sees, and the more clues we can give him about what we want him to understand the more precisely his interpretation will align with our own. We use colors, shapes, stylizations, etc. that convey our values, our mindset, our message and story to the user. The pieces that build a website don’t exist in a vacuum: they sit in a web of interconnecting relationships, all of which the user has access to and experience with, and all of which contribute to his user experience.

If we want to orchestrate a particular experience, then, it’s imperative that design elements, language, and internal architecture are deliberately crafted to elicit a certain emotional response.

From good to great: emotional accessibility in user experience

At the heart of user experience lies a word I rarely hear bandied about in professional circles: love. It’s an unfortunate omission since, as Mick Malisic of frog design fame points out, “Design really is about loving something.” I mentioned iPods, the Dyson, and Levi jeans in the beginning of this article, everyday items that people don’t just use, but love. We love them for their design as well as their “quintessence”. This love is precisely what designers strive for. When I sit down to begin crafting a website, my goal is for you to love it. I don’t want you to like it. I don’t want you to find it “cool” or “hip”. I want you to love it. The more your emotions are engaged when reading my website, the more likely you are to hear me, the more influence I have over you.

We don’t talk a lot, as an industry, about emotional connections on the web. It’s an unfortunate oversight, as making emotional connections lies at the center of so much of what we do as an industry. We strive for good design, for good branding, for good usability because we want to make people care about something. Whether my website is for a microprocessor company, a non-profit charity, or a political campaign, I’m creating a website because I want to make you care about something, very often in order to compel you to do something.

Brilliant design is absolutely integral to the brilliant user experience. Design brings people and their needs together. It fills a void in human experience, eliciting emotions, creating opportunities, and forming relationships.

The Non-Neutrality of White

A client walks into my office. He’s one of my favorites — an advertising professor, clever, hip, kind. He strides into my office smartly dressed, a sheepish expression lurking out from behind a too-wide smile. I recognize that look at fifty paces; it means, “I’m terribly sorry but I have to make further asinine requests of you and I hate to do it, but you know how it goes.”

He sits down, smiling awkwardly, and says, “You know I love the site design. It’s sharp and bright and modern, and really intuitively laid out. But, well, the committee has a few complaints. The main one, the big one…well, I know I said I liked having minorities on the homepage, but they’re worried that if we have minorities on the front page people will think it’s a service provided only to minorities.”

I blink. “Wait, what?” I’m hoping I’ve misunderstood. Because what I think he’s saying seems completely ridiculous as he’s saying it.

He looks uncomfortable. “Well, they said that maybe if we just used less…like, people who are less minority-looking, maybe just some generic, white…”

“Hold on,” I interrupt. “There’s no such thing as a generic person. Professor, if I put white people on the website, someone might think it’s a service only provided to white people!” I let the sarcasm sink in for a second. I do feel slightly bad. I know he’s just the messenger. “No, probably not,” I allow, smiling for his sake. I realize that it must be uncomfortable for him, a stylish, middle-class, white guy making this request of a jeans-clad black girl with frizzy hair. 

“But do you understand what I mean about no such thing as a generic person? You’re in advertising, so you probably know this as well as I do. Everybody represents some group. The fact that in your mind white equals neutral is a symptom of a social dysfunction, and while I understand it, it doesn’t mean it’s right.”

This exchange wouldn’t be notable except for the fact that conversations like this don’t happen all the time. Many designers don’t have the luxury of standing up to their clients, educating them about the importance of race and ethnicity in visual design. While sociologists are fond of saying that race is not a reality but a social construct, the adage is not terribly useful for graphic designers as social constructs are what we deal in; they are our reality and our business. Graphic designers are part of a rich community of culture creators — the creative forces that shape our shared aesthetic, which in turn builds and maintains a set of social values. The images that we choose to show, and the contexts in which we choose to show them, imprint themselves upon our collective memory, creating a visual library that is referenced time and again in billboards, magazine articles, and online banner ads. Graphic designers use images in particular ways because those images have meaning, and the nuances between images can be vitally important.

Although multiculturalism in graphic design is currently enjoying a moment in the sun, many designers still don’t really understand what images of race mean, or even that images of race have meaning. The notion of race might be a social construct, but its implications are real. An image of a white doctor means something different to a black janitor than it does to a white housewife. An image of a black astronaut means something different to a Latino schoolteacher than to a white vagrant. Race, as a social reality, tells an important story. We react to it, whether we mean to or not. It’s powerful. And the one thing it isn’t, under any circumstance, is neutral.

Why do we use images of people in our work? What purposes do images of people serve in visual media? If we’re going to understand what it means to use white people versus people of color, we have to understand first why we use people at all.

Images of people are immediately engaging. When we see an image of a person, we begin to spin a story about that person. We look and we see someone we recognize — we see our mothers, neighbors, lovers, even childhood enemies. We see in that person something of ourselves, something of our memories and experiences. In this way, we also build a relationship with that image, and transitively with whatever the image is a part of — magazine article, blog post, advertisement, etc. The person that we see becomes the voice for the content that surrounds it, and suddenly not only do we hear it, but we also internalize and interpret it. It becomes part of our internal landscape, our personal mythology; its meaning is contextualized in terms of our own histories and experiences. This is why images are so powerful — they connect to us on our most fundamental, visceral levels.

But this is also why images can be dangerous. Images exist in a complex web of social forces: historical, economic, political, artistic. No image stands alone, representing itself. Its subject matter and style effect a particular message, and the meaning of that message is determined by a number of factors. When we see the same images of people or communities over and over again, they serve to create stereotypes: a prejudice coupled with a generalization or reduction of what is real, stripping away the individual. When we continue to use ethnicity to represent some ideal, the two concepts — of ethnicity and ideal — become intertwined, and a burdensome and ultimately handicapping stereotype is born.

Perhaps this is the reason it’s so easy to default to using white people in graphic design, to think of them as neutral. White people seem to be fair game — being the majority, we’re not afraid of “pigeon-holing” them, nor are we afraid of offending them by placing them in a broad range of circumstances, distasteful or otherwise. We tend to see white people as people without culture, without idiosyncrasy — safe. But if we unpack the idea even a little, we know this isn’t true. White people have history, politics, religion — all the things we’re so often afraid of singling out in minority communities. Just because I, as the designer, may see through whiteness to the nurse, the criminal, the happy child underneath, doesn’t mean that all audiences will see through whiteness, nor should they. Treating white people as cultureless and devoid of connotations is just as demeaning as using images of blacks and Latinos only in teen pregnancy and unemployment ads. Failing to note the importance of race degrades and impoverishes us all.

As graphic artists and visual designers, we have a responsibility to the cultures we enhance with our work to provide visual media that is accurate, engrossing, and enriching. And that means thinking very seriously about the images of people we include. Do they perpetuate stereotypes? Are they accurate? And, more than anything, are they real?

“Realness” belies the idea of the so-called neutral person. We use images of people as visual shorthand — people are emotional, they have history, they have likes, dislikes, hopes, fears. The way the person is dressed, the expression on her face, and certainly the color of her skin all convey a story. Racial identity has implications whether we like to admit it or not. When we see images of whites, blacks, Asians, etc, we believe something about those people based solely on their skin color, though what we believe is highly personal and dependent on many different factors. It’s a dirty secret most of us carry around, and confronting the reality of our own prejudices and racial biases is the first step towards using people images accurately and fairly.

If images of people are so powerful for these very reasons, why would we strive to use an image of a “neutral” person? What would that look like? Would it be someone devoid of family, of history, of race, of class, of desire? Would it be something human-like with a mouth and eyes but no soul peering out from behind them? The neutral image isn’t simply a white person — it’s no person at all because people aren’t neutral. They can’t be. Each one of us who looks upon an image projects her own biases and experiences — that is what it means to be moved by a design. We relate. And there is no person about whom we conjure no associations.

The selection of people images must be deeper and more careful than the random selection of the person deemed least interesting, least engaging, least controversial, least real. That’s the greatest ill of the search for the neutral person — it robs subject, and therefore the onlooker, of her self, the very thing that good design has to try to create and evoke. Imagery should be appropriately evocative — it should give us something to think, something to feel. Too much emphasis on a generic, “safe” model aims precisely for the creation of this fictional and hateful humanoid that falls hopelessly into the depths of the uncanny valley. And if we search for a neutral person — and worse, a white person perceived as neutral or non-threatening based on skin color alone — we miss our opportunity as visual designers to connect to our culture and society on a deep, intimate level.

What We Lose By Seeing

Watching the 2007 State of the Union address, I was filled with disquiet. Nothing seemed particularly unusual, and it wasn’t that I sensed a foreboding of any kind — in fact, I couldn’t place my finger on any particular thing that bothered me at first. It wasn’t the message itself, or the President, or anything immediately obvious. But the more I watched, the more uncomfortable I became until discomfort turned to a slow-burning anger. The anger was surprising — what was I growing so increasingly mad about? And then, out of nowhere, the realization struck me right between the eyes. As I watched President Bush and Speaker Pelosi exchange artful smiles, it occurred to me that I was bothered by how grossly insincere it seemed: all that clapping and standing and sitting and nodding and clapping and smiling… it all seemed so self-congratulatory and contrived. And as I realized it, the anger gave way to sadness, because this speech, which was supposed to unite the nation if only for one evening, left me feeling distant and cold. Instead of helping me see politics as a discourse in which I, an average American, could participate, it only served to further my opinion that politics is little more than pageantry, a magic show where falseness and sleight of hand reign supreme.

The President wasn’t talking to me. He was talking at his audience, putting on a visual spectacle that we’ve come to expect from such gatherings. I couldn’t help but wonder what it must have been like when the State of the Union address was delivered to a radio audience, who, lacking their eyes, could listen as a story unfolded, using only their imagination to see the President’s face, to construct sincerity around his visage even if there was none. For without sight to prove them wrong, they could believe anything. They could believe the message was intimate, meant to speak just to them. And that intimacy, that tremendously important being the center of the universe, is what we lose by seeing too much.

I was a little girl when the song “Video Killed the Radio Star” came out, and I didn’t really understand what that meant. Sure, I heard the standard interpretation that as image came to be central to music, pop music came to be dominated by the beautiful, and actual talent became simply a nice-to-have. But that interpretation, painfully true though it may be, misses something subtler, something even more debilitating. The sense of sight is so powerful, so central to our experiences that it easily overshadows our other faculties. So important are our eyes that we very often lose the chance to explore the other senses, and moreover, to make an emotional connection based on the unseen, the abstract, that which is intuited. (I have a theory that this is the real reason we close our eyes when we kiss — to awaken the other senses, to lose ourselves in the way the kiss feels in a world of darkness.) Before music videos, meaning and depth were plucked from the music, from the lyrics and the vocal inflections of the singer, or perhaps from memories reconstructed from live performance, including smells and conversations that accompanied the concert. Music, even radio music, was a highly personal thing: a person’s experience of a song was dependent on his own interpretation and experience of it. But music video removed the listener from the center of the song. Music video makes one particular narrative the most important. It takes what used to be subjective and makes it objective. More than merely making the music industry about sex appeal and glamour over talent, “killing the radio star” means squeezing the soul out of music, killing the music for the listener.

Before the abundance of visual media, we used to listen. We used to imagine. We were a culture of storytellers and bards. We gathered around bonfires to listen to our friends and families spin tales, true and not-so-much, imagining the characters, their voices, their faces. But in the age of movies, television, magazines and the internet, so little of that is preserved today. We are guided primarily by eye candy rather than substance. We depend chiefly on sight not only to inform, but also to entertain, even if it means the loss of imagination and intimacy.

Before the President’s speech, I caught the tail end of American Idol. Poignantly, I recall Randy Jackson saying to a young singer, “I’m not so sure about the rest, but if I close my eyes, you’re pretty good, you can sing.” Eyes open, he wouldn’t have liked the singer: he didn’t have “the whole package”; Randy would have been distracted by his clothing, his gangling limbs and general appearance. But without looking, with his eyes closed, he could focus on the only things that actually mattered: the quality, expression, and timbre of the voice.

As a web designer, I find myself in the curious position of being at the helm of a vehicle cultivating a new culture, one of immediate information, of read-write possibilities and responsibilities that not only allow but encourage consumers to be creators. I have an obligation to engage and entertain, but my domain is structure, form, and images. Without my words, how do I fulfill my obligation to offer my audience rich media without tripping into the land of visual excess?

I once worked on a project for the University of Texas at Austin’s School of Journalism where I was asked to build a new website. I settled on art direction that relied on the greatest news stories of the 21st century. I collected images that would evoke the complete memory of an era or a spectacle with just a glance. I had images of Martin Luther King, Jr, Oliver North on trial, Neil Armstrong on the moon, and Nixon flashing his double peace signs to name a few. But of the images I collected, one was obviously missing: I did not use a single image of Adolf Hitler or WWII. Although I was committed to reconstructing American history, I was also committed to upholding a certain image of the journalism department, and images of Hitler provoke such hostility that I couldn’t in good conscience include that imagery.

But what I could do was suggest Hitler without showing him. I could tap into memory and association, and choose images that include the story of Hitler without shoving him in my audience’s face. I relied on the memory and education of my audience, and in place of Hitler I used a moving image of Jesse Owens receiving the gold medal at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. Next to Jesse Owens stood German long jumper Luz Long, right arm extended in salute to Der Führer. Not everyone would recognize the image, of course, but those who did would be able to reconstruct the rest of the scene for themselves — they could infer the unseen. It wasn’t necessary to show everything; the mind can understand even what the eyes don’t see. Using images this way, I was able to preserve the integrity of the website’s art direction without using upsetting imagery. Moreover, it allowed me to tell a subtle story, to draw the audience in and allow them to use their own imaginations; it required them to think.

A good visual design should support a narrative — it should support the telling of a good story, leading the reader through the content. It shouldn’t distract, and more importantly, each image should mean something; it should exist for a reason other than to break up a text-heavy page.

A couple of years ago, I was engaged in an argument with a fellow web designer about the importance of image alt text. It was my position that alt text for non-informational images (such as graphs or tables) was unnecessary. “If a user is blind, “ I reasoned, “what does he care that I have a photograph of the university tower on my website?”

My friend shrugged. “Well, I guess if you don’t really care about what the image says,” she said slowly, “you really don’t need it in the first place.”

The simple truth in that statement is embarrassingly obvious in retrospect. Images — and the words used to describe them — are valuable because they provide emotional content. They are the hooks into which we sink our thoughts and feelings, and what we reel in depends entirely on our relationship to that picture: the more depth the picture has, the more information can be gleaned from it. Pictures that are merely pretty might provide a bright spot on a page, but a designer should aim to provide more than that. A good image, and a good overall visual design, should arrest attention, allowing the onlooker time to draw something out of the image and to put something of herself into it.

In selecting images for a design, I consider what alt text the writer would add to my image. If someone were to describe the image to me, would they notice an expression, an emotion? Would they feel something, be inspired? Or would they notice only the models straight, white teeth, or the artificially pink petals on the rose? Is there any soul in the image at all? Will the image support the telling of a story or is it killing the radio star?

Visual design has to mean something. It has to speak to my viewer intimately and truthfully. It has to be capable of drawing the viewer into a relationship, however momentary, however ephemeral. I want my viewer to stay with me because her mind is engaged, because she’s piecing together a narrative. I don’t want to trick her with sleight of hand; I don’t want to bedazzle her with pageantry and ostentation. I want to win her over with the timbre of my voice, with what I’ve said and with what I’ve left to the imagination. I don’t want my message to get lost in the seeing.