Avoid Designing Nav into the Background
It’s the web - some people can stop reading this article simply because they already know that truth. The paradigm of web interaction is different than a poster - nobody walks up to a poster (or a postcard or birthday flyer) and presses a link to be taken to another poster on the other side of the planet. There are a lot of differences between print and the web, including our lack of control over the user’s environment. It’s the web. Say no more.
When designing for the web we can get caught up in the sometimes not-so-subtle push from our employers to create interfaces that are works of art in themselves, beyond the purpose of making money, beyond increasing conversions or achieving business goals. The temptation to please and appease puts us at loggerheads with the limitations of the web - bandwidth and file sizes, for example.
Given an ideal world we might be tempted to put one more image in and then just one more until the interface is full of everything except whitespace. We move the navigation up into the zone of banner blindness (the top 15%), drop it’s colour back so it doesn’t draw the eye away from our real design and reduce the text size. There, the navigation is perfectly blended behind the background - after all we (the developers) are perfectly aware that it’s back there! Any fool could unravel the mystery. So the design becomes about the pretty pictures rather than about creating intuitively usable interfaces.
I can promise you this much - your employer would rather the website was successful than pretty. Given a choice. Because we’re in business to make money, or increase market share or something. Whereas various designers can grow to be in the business of something else entirely, if not checked or made aware there’s a healthy balance.
My point is simply that in the process of website over-design it becomes apparent that graphic design might have pushed other web features into the background (such as navigation). That’s not a good thing. Not many people repeatedly visit websites to just look at that photo pop, especially if you push out the download sizes. Don’t be afraid of whitespace on the page, embrace it. Don’t design the navigation into the background because marketing insists it’s mission should take priority. What’s a website without understandable navigation?
When a user goes to your website your mission as a designer is first and foremost to make it obvious what they can do, and what features are available. Don’t crowd them, bully them, or hit them on the head with your marketing message as an array of wall to wall photography and over-indulged gradients. That won’t make you sell more of whatever it is you’re touting. Forget about the control you have in print. Less can be more effective sometimes. Whitespace is your friend. Embrace the humble hyperlink. Don’t make them think (as the famous line goes). Don’t make me think!
