(This is Part 5. Please check out Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 3a, and Part 4)

Go get ‘em Mom: patiencemerriman.com

I recently designed a web site for my mother, who is running for the Vermont state legislature (I’m so proud of her!). Vermont is a small, largely rural state, and there are a lot of regular working class folks there who like many Americans have to struggle to get by. And despite its ultra-liberal reputation, it’s actually a fairly conservative and traditional place in most parts. You actually won’t find a lot of latte-drinking, sushi-eating elites in Vermont, in particular where my Mom lives.

So when Mom asked me to design her site, she said “don’t make it too fancy”. It couldn’t look like some fancy New York City hipster boutique web site that cost thousands of dollars to build. Candidates in Vermont literally have a spending cap of $2000 for their entire campaigns, so although my work was pro-bono I needed to keep the design simple and economical.

What’s more, my mother hates Helvetica!

So I tried to make it nice but not hip or slick. I think the result is nice enough that I’m happy to link to it here on my site and show it to all my elite snobby designer friends, but honestly I had a hard time finding a balance between fancy and not-fancy. I actually think I am pretty bad at non-fancy design!

Left, Right, High, and Low

I’d like to see what more-skilled and elite designers would do with a similar challenge, where something real and important is at stake and appropriateness to the audience is critical.

A handy example is Andy Rutledge’s unsolicited redesign for the White House web site. While excellent and elegant design-wise, I think it is entirely wrong for the typical Bush voter, or for that matter to the typical American. I presume Andy to be sympathetic to the Administration’s political objectives, but his design sensibility does not map to what I think Karl Rove thinks President Bush’s “base” would prefer. The current White House site is anti-slick and anti-elitist by choice. Andy’s White House site design, on the other hand, looks like something a latte-drinking, sushi-eating, President Gore would have wanted — and he would have been just as wrong as I think Andy is.

One look at President Clinton’s White House site from 2000 (love that Wayback machine!), complete with two-fisted animated GIF American flags, shows that Clinton’s web team, like Bush’s, thought that a lowbrow design was the best approach.

Both parties have upper-class elites among their target voters and supporters, of course, but these supporters are not reached by web sites and banners — they get embossed letters with elegant typography inviting them to $1,000-a-plate dinners. The masses of working-class and middle-class supporters in each party’s “base”, however, are the targets of politicial web sites, and the design language used to communicate and connect with them is mission-critical.

Next: Class and Web Design, Part 6: Breaking The Class Barrier

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(This is Part 4. Please check out Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 3a)

Earlier, I talked about the markers of class that surround us every day. A person’s cultural immersion in a narrow range of class markers can create a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy, a vicious circle of desire: Poor people can’t afford expensive products, so manufacturers skimp on design, resulting on lower-quality and perhaps uglier products, conditioning the lower classes to accept bad design as normal even to the point of considering the markers of ugly design as appropriate and desirable to them.

Victor Lombardi reminds us that eBay is a kind of online flea market, so he asks: isn’t it appropriate that the design of eBay’s web site would have a similar vibe, and a similar level of design sophistication, of a roadside flea market?

In other words, if the bargain-basement is your intended milieu, it’s almost impossible, and quite possibly bad business, to attempt to escape it with a boutique design sensibility. MORE…

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What’s wrong with this picture?

(This is Part 3a. Please check out Part 1 , Part 2, and Part 3)

There’s a fascinating debate at Subtraction about the design of the new New York Post web site, between the AIGA’s Liz Danzico and the New York Times‘ (and Subtraction’s) Khoi Vinh. The discussion, I think, dances around class issues all over the place as Khoi and Liz speculate about what is and is not appropriate to what they think of as the typical New York Post reader.

I think class totally comes into play in this conversation. The Post and the Times are, in fact, classic and quintessential class markers. In fact, class is probably the easiest and most obvious way of differentiating the two papers overall (besides the tabloid/broadsheet format). The Times is a higher class product in nearly every way, from the reading level to the products advertised to the people featured in the “Vows” section.

Yes, there is a lot of crossover between the papers’ readerships, and for sports and gossip (and even occasionally local investigative journalism) the Post may pick up some of the Times‘ demographic. But sports and gossip are class markers that increasingly bleed across the class spectrum. Plus, is there no better indicator of the Times‘ class pretention that they still deliberately avoid in-depth sports coverage, salacious celebrity gossip, and comic strips? MORE…

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(This is Part 3. Please check out Part 1 and Part 2)

Does the “AS SEEN ON TV” badge tell you that a product is good? Or does it have the opposite effect on you? My guess is that, if you’re anything like me, the little red badge indicates “cheap crap” to you. But to millions of people it is a badge of quality — it tells them that the product is mainstream and well-known.

Why the difference? How can a little red badge radically alter the perceived credibility of a product? Whatever the answer is, you can bet that it correlates pretty closely with class. In fact, I contend that class plays some kind of role in just about every aspect of a product’s existence, from its business strategy to how it’s marketed and everything in between.

Before I go any further, however, I want to be clear that I’m not saying anything about this is right or wrong. I’m just saying that is the way things are, and that we should be talking about how much class can or cannot be extracted from the design equation. MORE…

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Clinton on Fox. Notice the footnote: If Clinton hadn’t done this interview, Richard Clarke’s role in fighting terror (and Bush’s role in ending Clarke’s role) would drift further away from the Fox viewer’s consciousness.

I read a post today at Sean Coon’s connecting*the*dots blog entitlted “and keep your enemies closer“, and I thought at first it was going to be about how progressives and liberals shouldn’t be afraid to get up close and personal with conservatives, that in fact it may be to our advantage to keep them close by and engaged. Specifically I was thinking about how Democrats are apparently afraid to appear on Fox News, and about how stupid that strategy is.

Bill Clinton was on Fox News Sunday today, in an interview with Chris Wallace. Wallace asked a series of questions that, in effect, accused the Clinton Administration of ignoring Al Qaeda. Wallace probably thought that Clinton, like many other Democrats, would hem and haw and foolishly attempt to actually answer his “when did you stop beating your wife”-type questions instead of coming back and attacking the question by responding with facts that undermine the question itself.

Bubba wasn’t having any of that. MORE…

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As I discussed in my previous post, class is one of the few things Americans simply don’t like to talk about. Paul Fussell discusses this reluctance in the introduction to his excellent Class: A Guide Through the American Status System (a classic book I read many years ago and just picked up again to help me with this series):

Although most Americans sense that they live within an extremely complicated system of social classes and suspect that much of what is thought and done here is prompted by considerations of status, the subject has remained murky. And always touchy. You can outrage people today simply by mentioning social class, very much the way, sipping tea among the aspidistras a century ago, you could silence a party by adverting too openly to sex.

Design observers and commentators can usually, like Steven Heller in the Bush backdrop example, get away with not discussing class because we don’t often have to deal with class-crossing products or sites. If you typically design for Cartier, The Museum of Modern Art, and JP Morgan, you probably won’t find yourself designing for Reader’s Digest or the Christian Coalition any time soon. What’s more, the conversations we have about design and the articles we read about design tend to limit themselves to a narrow and somewhat higher-end strata of the American class hierarchy. When lower-end product design is discussed, it is usually to sneeringly point out how “bad” it is. We rarely stray from the comfort of our own class milieu.

But before I go further, I think I should explain and define what exactly I mean by “class”. MORE…

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In the last year or so, hundreds of articles, blog posts, and conversations in the web design world have revolved around the question of “Why does bad design succeed?” MySpace, eBay, Google, and craigslist are usually cited as examples of “bad design” (or even “ugly design”) that works. And everyone has a theory about it:

• zefrank and Brian Fling say MySpace’s ugly design empowers the untrained designer to express themselves with tools they’ve never had before.
• Jason Santa Maria, Greg Storey, Joshua Porter, and Andy Rutledge take a usability, features, and content focus, arguing that when ugly sites succeed, they do so despite their bad design — that while they may arguably employ “bad” visual design, they indisputably have valuable content or efficient interaction design.
• Tom Chi at OK/Cancel says that business strategy is a critical key to success, independent of design.
• Andrei at Design By Fire says that the sentiment behind Paul Rand’s famous quote (”The public is more familiar with bad design than good design. It is, in effect, conditioned to prefer bad design, because that is what it lives with.”) has led many designers to cynically and deliberately produce bad design even though they know better.
• Tony Wright at GoJobby said that the success of these sites simply proves that good design doesn’t matter at all.

Robert Scoble, who published the original inspiration for much of this debate, missed the mark overall but in one respect I think he came a little closer to the right idea by arguing that “ugly” design is populist in nature, that the sites in question deliberately avoid looking fancy in order to seem more personal and less corporate. I say he comes close because he actually makes the connection between design and taste, and he notices that taste is closely related to a person’s self image.

But none of these discussions dare to speak of something that seems painfully obvious to me: talking about taste is one step away from talking about class, and nobody likes to talk about class. MORE…

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You can’t compensate for incompetance with prayer, luck, stubbornness, or waiting until your presidency is over, either. Demotivational poster from despair.com.

I read an article recently that pointed out that when members of Congress voted in 2003 to authorize Bush to invade Iraq, they were voting not just for war with Iraq, but specifically for the Bush Administration to manage and wage that war.

Most liberal hawks are willing to admit only that they made a mistake in trusting the president and his team to administer the invasion and occupation competently. … The New Republic’s Leon Wieseltier added, “I think that it is impossible, even for someone who supported the war, or especially for someone who did, not to feel very bitter about the way it has been conducted and the way it has been explained.”

Now, more than three years after “Mission Accomplished”, the Administration has proven itself to almost everyone regardless of party that they are incompetant at war management. In fact, they’ve not shown competance at much of anything big or important (except, of course, elections).

After the prescription-drug plan rollout stumble, the Katrina rescue fiasco, the lost trail for Osama bin Laden, and of course the actual Iraq War itself, this incompetance is now especially clear. But even back in 2003 it should already have been apparent to most observers (especially to liberal hawks) that the Bush Administration just wasn’t likely to do the job well.

This phenomenon struck me as something that web consultants deal with all the time. When we design web sites, we design them to be used by the end users and by our clients. If our clients use offshore programming teams to manage their IT services, if their web maintenance staff is lean and mean or even non-existent, if key content stakeholders lack basic computer skills, if they are stronger in one technology versus another — then it is our obligation as consultants to cater our recommendations to their particular strengths and their weaknesses. We cannot recommend an ambitous solution requiring a team of top-notch experts if the client simply doesn’t have the team to support it.

Just an observation… And, dear clients, please forgive the unfortunate parallel with the Bush Administration! You are far more competant at just about everything.

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During the 1800’s (before the formation of today’s FDNY) there were some private New York City “fire departments” who would deliberately set fires then demand payment from property owners to put them out. This is how the Bush Administration is treating America regarding Iraq today: “We set the fire, so you should trust us to put it out.” (The image is from the cover of a 145-year-old Harpers magazine.)

In September of 2002, when the war in Iraq was still seen as something other than inevitable, Al Gore opposed the Bush Administration’s planned attack in an amazingly prescient speech. Almost everything he said and everything he feared has come to pass. Here’s an amazing excerpt:

Moreover, if we quickly succeed in a war against the weakened and depleted fourth rate military of Iraq and then quickly abandon that nation as President Bush has abandoned Afghanistan after quickly defeating a fifth rate military there, the resulting chaos could easily pose a far greater danger to the United States than we presently face from Saddam. We know that he has stored secret supplies of biological and chemical weapons throughout his country.

We have no evidence, however, that he has shared any of those weapons with terrorist group. However, if Iraq came to resemble Afghanistan - with no central authority but instead local and regional warlords with porous borders and infiltrating members of Al Qaeda than these widely dispersed supplies of weapons of mass destruction might well come into the hands of terrorist groups.

If we end the war in Iraq, the way we ended the war in Afghanistan, we could easily be worse off than we are today. When Secretary Rumsfield was asked recently about what our responsibility for restabilizing Iraq would be in an aftermath of an invasion, he said, “that’s for the Iraqis to come together and decide.”

Replace “weapons of mass destruction” and “biological and chemical weapons” with “conventional armaments and explosives” and you have a pretty accurate picture of where we are right now, with a well-armed opposition killing our soldiers every day. Can you imagine how bad things would be if there were WMDs in Iraq after all? With insurgents and Al Qaeda infiltrators using them the way they’re currently using Saddam’s conventional arsenal against us?
MORE…

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