Accessibility

Extra Credits, a fantastic YouTube channel, created an informative video about the importance of considering accessibility early in the design process. They illustrate plenty of examples where design features originally intended for the sensory impaired actually benefits the non-handicapped in various scenarios.

I think the positive externalities of designing with accessibility in mind is a great value proposition for companies and individuals. Even though accessibility is now dogma for anyone who studies human-computer interaction, there exists plenty of interfaces that lack accessible functionality, particularly in cinematic settings.

Man of Steel, 2013

In most situations, I believe that creating broadcast-quality and beautiful content should not supersede the effort to create content for multiple modalities.* After all, 1.3B people globally live with some sort of vision impairment [WHO], 1 in 8 Americans over the age of 12 have detectable hearing loss in both ears [NIH], and that's not even counting processing or motor disorders.

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 demands the following technical descriptors of web products: operable, understandable, and robust. They include ideas ranging from maximizing legibility with sufficient contrast to ensuring the programmatic discoverability of elements to assistive technologies.

https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG21/quickref/

I believe that when the day comes that a majority of web products comply with most, if not all, of the  WCAG, assistive technologies can be more easily standardized and improved. Going forward, I think it's wise to set a standard of personal responsibility for my design projects.

I'm always open to learning more about designing for disabilities, and if there are any resources or stories that would be helpful, please do share with me.

Recommended reading: Shinohara, K., Bennett, C. L., Pratt, W., & Wobbrock J.O. (2018). Tenets for Social Accessibility: Towards Humanizing Disabled People in Design. ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing (TACCESS) - Special Issue of Papers from ASSETS 2016, 11(1), 6:1-6:31. https://doi-org.ezproxy.rit.edu/10.1145/3178855

Blogger Brutalism

I've actually considered designing my own website from scratch, but decided to eschew the upkeep in favor of a simple Blogger interface. For the purposes of a personal website, I wanted a space to share and archive ideas while maximizing usability.

Rather having to deal with writing my own script or pay for web hosting, Blogger has everything I need: an editor to draft and publish time-stamped blog posts, web-standard compliant templates, the ability to direct my custom domain to Blogger's Google servers, the option to edit source code, and additional integrations like AdSense.

Even though Pantophagy Design is the name of my website, it is not explicitly a portfolio website. I believe that better platforms exist for the exhibition of my design projects, such as my Portfolium page. Over time, I learned that, at least in my current stage of life, I am a larger fan of strategy and process than product, which is how I ended up here. I look up to James Gurney, who is a brilliant painter and multimedia artist himself, but has made a bigger name for himself for his teaching and experimental attitude.

http://gurneyjourney.blogspot.com/

I also hesitated using Blogger at first because, in this day and age, it's easy to feel that modern-day visual design skews towards minimalism. Case in point, take a look at Uber's third redesign at Uber's 2018 rebrand webpage. In summary, Uber prioritized functionality by creating a typographic logo that is highly legible and recognizable. 

https://www.uber.design/case-studies/rebrand-2018

Whenever I think of this design movement, I feel compelled to create sterile, utilitarian, and perfect interfaces, and I have to pull myself back by remembering today's brutalism, which is an art movement that is a cultural reaction to the lightness of modern visual design. This is perfectly demonstrated by Yale School of Art's website.

http://art.yale.edu/

You might be thinking–how pretentious is it that they're ironically using old-school HTML-based web design? But their choice in web design is still legitimizing. I used to think that brutalism was diametrically opposed to good visual design, but I realized that's like comparing apples to oranges, since brutalism describes an aesthetic style, rather than a visual strategy. In fact, they're not mutually exclusive since a lot of brutalist websites seem to use highly legible text.

Another perspective: Brutalist architecture was ugly at 100% function over form, whereas brutalism in web design today kicks it up to 200%, as a rebellious, ugly fashion trend.

After all, how refreshing is it to encounter a web page that looks like how you fundamentally understand a website works –a website that doesn't reflect the potentially insidious intentions of the company trying to use psychological trickery to get you to look at or click on a certain thing, or –a website that simply has every link and special effect thrown onto the front page because that was the extent of their creators' technical abilities?

http://www.cnn.com/US/OJ/

http://www.dpgraph.com/

Other brutalist websites: https://brutalistwebsites.com/.