What Does Your Design Really Say?
September 20th, 2007 in Web Design Culture
by: Matthew Griffin
As designers, whether we realize it or not, the products of our labor have a huge effect on culture at large. Specifically, web designers decide how linguistic data should be presented to the population which affect how they will interact with that data. Wow! Design matters.
A perfect example of this is the recent project of design gurus Pilipp Steinweber and Andreas Koller called Similar Diversity. Essentially, Similar Diversity is a graphical representation of the common word usage in the writings considered holy by the major world religions. It portrays all religion as a huge nebulous blob of similar thoughts and ideas.
This design is saying something and affecting the way people think in a very tangible way. It reminds me that every decision I make in my design process should be evaluated carefully so I can better understand the message I am conveying with my design. Can theology really be reduced to a mechanistic chart of similar words ripped from their original context? After all the meaning of a word changes dramatically when you change the words around it. No. Religions are opposed to each other in concept not in common use of language to express those concepts.
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