The temptation of creative convenience nearly succeeded in leading me astray, though “astray” may not be appropriate in this context of my recent redesign of no substance. all eloquence.
It had been my hope to stray from what had been, in my opinion, the most overused visual device in contemporary interactive design: Diagonal stripes.
This is not to say that I prejudicially view popularity as overuse.
I will suggest the counterpoint of another trendy visual device, the vertical gradient, which I have no qualms about using. The difference is arbitrariness: Vertical gradients, a phenomenon readily visible in the natural world, have a historical relationship with us. In nature, they form horizons; they ground us in our environments. In design, their purpose should be similar; they should be used to complement and reinforce horizontal elements.
But what do diagonal stripes reinforce or complement?
Perhaps my perception has merely been colored by my recent reading of Edward R. Tufte’s The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, in which such decoration is (within the context of early nineteen-eighties offset-printed graphs) referred to simply as “chartjunk.” But that’s hardline modernist minimalism talking‚Äîinstead of writing it off as decadent decoration, might it be investigated and understood? Just as the vertical gradient can be wedged into a modernist design philosophy with proper defense of its function, perhaps the same can be done for the diagonal stripes.
Let us examine examples from a few popular sites, blogs TechCrunch and Kottke, trendy portal site Netvibes, and the 2006 update of Yahoo.
Where, then, might we find a confluence in context? Forty-five degree stripes are used to fill rectangular shapes. Rectangular shapes are bound by lines at ninety-degree angles. Aha: A forty-five degree angle, then, offers the greatest textural contrast between the interior and exterior of the rectangle. Thus the stripes enhance layout contrast and with such functionality should be admissable in even a strict interpretation of modernist doctrine. Done.
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