> can you imagine if we had designers adding gradients, page-curls, and drop-shadows on airport signage?
Instead we have designers adding lighting and depth to create gradients and shadows. Good golly, have you been to a modern airport recently? Sure form follows function, but there is absolutely no hesitation on the part of designers to degrade function to make things sexy unless you work in government.
Let's not pretend that the offline world isn't concerned with aesthetics any less than the online one is.
"It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on Earth has ever produced the expression 'as pretty as an airport'. Airports are ugly. Some are very ugly. Some attain a degree of ugliness that can only be the result of a special effort. This ugliness arises because airports are full of people who are tired, cross, and have just discovered that their luggage has landed in Murmansk, and architects have on the whole tried to reflect this in their designs.
They have sought to highlight the tiredness and crossness motif with brutal shapes and nerve jangling colours, to make effortless the business of separating the traveller for ever from his or her luggage or loved ones, to confuse the traveller with arrows that appear to point at the windows, distant tie racks, or the current position of Ursa Minor in the night sky, and wherever possible expose the plumbing on the grounds that it is functional, and conceal the departure gates, presumably on the assumption that they are not" – Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea Time Of The Soul
(In all honesty, I suspect I'm guilty of producing several websites that could easily be accused of those same faults – though I don't _think_ I've ever accidentally sent anyone to Murmansk…)
Well some airports are better designed than others and I'd imagine it's bloody difficult to do well. But the criteria of a good airport design is something most people can agree on and it's not about sexiness but about being able to get from A to B, get your luggage, find toilets and changing areas, find transport to the city etc. If you accept that form follows function, degrading function will make things less 'sexy' not more. Aesthetically attractive design is an emergent property of cohesive, useful, and consistent implementation, not something smeared on top to prettify - works well looks best. It's why we prefer tools like IRC, SMS, and text editors without embellishment. It's a lot of why this site or Reddit or Google is popular.
Instead we have designers adding lighting and depth to create gradients and shadows. Good golly, have you been to a modern airport recently? Sure form follows function, but there is absolutely no hesitation on the part of designers to degrade function to make things sexy unless you work in government.
Let's not pretend that the offline world isn't concerned with aesthetics any less than the online one is.