Nothing says click here like "click here." In what seems like the distant past, the phrase was a redundancy employed exclusively by HTML hacks and neophyte banner advertisers. Budding design fascists took delight in railing against its use, arguing that underlined blue text already said the same thing. Why say nothing when you can say something - like describing the document being linked to, perhaps? Just because. Empirically speaking, nothing says click here like "click here."
What happens when functional design is stupid? When stupid design works? It becomes canonized and repeated ad infinitum, as it must. The "click here" example is illustrative: slapping the cliché on an ad isn't merely a reliable method of increasing clickthrough, it may be the only such trick in the book. (Witness CNET's trade booklet, The Do's and Don'ts of Online Advertising: "Click here! ... It teaches users how to react to advertising in this new medium.") Of course, Web advertising is simply critical HTML - HTML that lives by the click, dies by the click. Which suggests that its problems are the problems of every Web designer.
FEED's latest feature, "How Things Should Look," sets out to help, indirectly - pitting the manifest dictums of functionalist design stalwart Edward Tufte against prefab iconoclast David Carson. Clean vs. dirty. Structured vs. chaotic. But what of right vs. stupid? Author David Bennahum remarks that "USA Today might be the best example of what happens to Tufte in the wrong hands," begging the question of how it came to be the highest-circulation newspaper in the world. The subtext of Bennahum's essay is astonishment that neither designer has applied himself or his principles to online design.
Too bad. The debate would be better served by a FEED dialog between the luminaries themselves, expressed in pure aesthetics, than by a feature essay. Certainly, both would abstain from the hoary "click here" method of multipage flowthrough and offer instead a hitherto-unseen alternative to cliché. Something "intuitive" or "outrageous," but inevitably compelling. In the absence of more correct, more functional tactics, and in the face of the success of ludicrous but successful ploys, I'll suspend both my disbelief and disrespect.
This article appeared originally in HotWired.
