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AIGA

Posted on March 19th, 2007 by Shane

By now everyone has probably seen the AIGA redesign or at least seen the numerous posts and discussions on the site. Moreover, you’ve probably seen it in every other CSS gallery, but most of those galleries don’t leave much room for discussion. Let’s take a look at Happy Cog’s redesign of the AIGA website, the online portal for the professional association for design.

Looking under the hood, you will see right away that this beautiful website is bound by pixels—blasphemy! The pixels do keep the site from scaling beautifully, but in some situations the clients probably have specific requirements. In this case, the use of pixels is done on purpose, mostly to support the sIFR headings. The only other problem you might notice is the use of inline styles; but then again, do we need to specifically care in this case? I doubt the AIGA website will be needing to easily and readily change designs.

Moving back to the aesthetics, AIGA’s new website is a force to be reckoned with. The content is clean cut and presented in so that nothing is missed. It also reflects the AIGA’s new direction, part of which is a renewed focus on previous work. Here’s what Jason has to say about it:

From the start, we knew we needed to rethink the entire navigation structure to reflect the new direction in which AIGA is headed. Additionally, we wanted to help them find their place in a more editorial rich space like the web, drawing from AIGA’s plethora of wonderful articles by such luminaries as Ellen Lupton, Steven Heller, and many more.

The faintly contrasted colors on the homepage allow for an intriguing design that’s shaped around subtle changes. Just look at the main content on the homepage; small changes in colors (light gray to white and back again) along with the AIGA logo’s shifted appearance. Immediately upon landing at the site, you can see that the main focus is the articles, something that was hidden in the previous edition.

In addition to simply providing access to the site’s pages, the main navigation reinforces the site’s purpose well beyond any introductory blurp could. Scanning the navigation of a site allows you to take it all in; you know what’s here and how to get there with little to no effort. In this case, you have that and more. Looking at the navigation you know what AIGA has on it’s website and what it’s purpose is in the design industry: they’re here to provide inspiration, resources, education, and more.

AIGA’s new website makes some excellent strides over it’s predecessor, and although it is bound by some inline styles and pixel-based sizing, it still manages to pull off an unmatched design.

Tags: Blog, Design Resources, Light Background, sIFR, Tabbed Menu, U.S.

Rated 6.1 from 13 votes

More Opinions on AIGA

How can you frown upon the use of inline styles, and then just say, “oh, it’s ok, they won’t be changing the design anytime soon”? If you’re going to climb up to the top of the metaphorical high dive, jump off. They aren’t gods. Just because they pretend to be, doesn’t mean you have to agree with, or accept everything they do/say as scripture.

– Joseph
Perhaps what I meant wasn’t as clear as I had hoped it would be. Let me explain…

Using inline styles is frowned upon by a great deal— there’s no doubt about that. The reason they are so frowned upon, however, is because of the movement towards more semantic and standards-compliant code. In other words, separating presentation from markup to allow for more agile updates and control over your websites via stylesheets.

The idea of stylesheets, beyond what I described above, serves to allow easily changed or updated style changes to the site. I am not dismissing their slanted view of Web standards, but rather looking at it from another perspective. The simple fact is that they (most likely) will not change their design until far into the future.

There is no scripture or religion involved, just an alternative view on the “Web standards battle.”

Thanks for the comment and I hope this clears up any confusion.

– Mark
Actually, I think it is you who is confused. Happy Cog, founded by Zeldman (the father of modern web standards), supposedly sets the bar for the way we as web developers develop for the web (presentation that is). If you see something contradictory to what they preach, on a site that they’ve built, you can’t half call them out on it, as you did. That was my point. The “web standards” movement is pointless if no one follows their own “standards.” Anyway, thanks for trying to clear up the confusion, and thanks for your ums.com articles. I enjoy reading them.

– Joseph
[…] I’m not sure why I didn’t review the Happy Cog website earlier, especially after doing the AIGA website (Happy Cog was the company behind that one). Happy Cog is a prominent website design company whose […]

– Happy Cog | Unmatched Style

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