Design pattern critiquing

People new to design sometimes feel they should add graphic interest or evidence of their creativity – coloured borders, icons everywhere, interesting fonts. They don’t always think through why.

But everything you see in a document should be explainable as:

• a constraint of whatever channel you’re using (for example, browser navigation you can’t hide, page or screen size, available typefaces, colours and so on)
• a design pattern that helps you to explain your ideas, and that helps readers to find, understand or use them.

For example, on the page you’re looking at now there are arrows linking to the previous or next page.

So a design pattern to describe that might read:

Problem: some readers want to read in a linear way, as they might a book, to make sure they cover everything.

Solution: provide links representing ‘back’ and ‘next’, so they can move between pages in sequence.

There’s an introduction to define the title and sell you the page, links to related things, and notes about relevance. All these things can be defined as considered answers to user needs that I identified at the start, as I was sketching possible page designs.

If a feature cannot be accounted for in this way, then it may be purely decorative and superfluous. Perhaps even misleading or distracting. This is not always a problem, but sometimes it is – it may mislead readers, or act as clutter that distracts them from seeing intentional aspects of your design. It can devalue other aspects of your project that you have worked hard to imbue with meaning.

This is the intentionality of information design. If we move over to its cousin, graphic design, a different kind of intentionality applies – aesthetic, expressive and allusive.

How can you tell if a feature has a function? Remove it and see what difference it makes. This is a commutation test.