MTIV: Process, Inspiration and Practice for the New Media Designer (Paperback)

They offer instead a rather refreshing and long overdue thoughtpiece on 'New Media' design that is not confined to the web. Our world has obviously chugged along since the days of whimsical DHTML and the other Nielsenesque extreme of prosaic "usability for everything", and we now have truly new mediums, modern technologies that need increasingly intelligent designing for.

This book presents some of the most practical, common-sensical ideologies to deal with such new-fangled challenges. Several philosophical elements of creative design are discussed, and while such rhetoric may not be everyone's bag, the writing is real-worldly and intuitive enough to be engrossing.

What makes it an outstanding book though is the smart undercurrent of design as an art of 'problem solving', with its primary agenda of identifying and meeting goals that target users expect from the medium they interact with.

You won't find tips, techniques and code snippets here except when inevitable to illustrate an idea. When we discuss color for instance, we talk about the affective influences of colour on people, not Pantene decimals or the spokes of a colour wheel. Discussing typography is not about quaint typefaces or font sizes but about leading the reader into the information, aiding and facilitating communication. The illustrations are fresh, exciting and for anyone related to design, veritably inspiring.

Is this required reading in graphic design courses yet? It should be. It certainly could be. A highly recommended reading for anyone in the business of design.

That book was David Siegel's Creating Killer Web Sites, and Hillman Curtis' MTIV is an admirable successor to the first Web bestseller. MTIV does not contain quite the same mix of stuff as its predecessor, and that's a good thing, as the Web and our understanding of it has changed since Siegel's time. Foremost is the fact that Flash has now assumed an importance that plain vanilla HTML once held.

Curtis the Flasher of Renown.
Hillman Curtis is one of the best and most famous Flashers on the planet. He is the Flash designer who first started using the term motion graphics for what he was doing in the early days of Flash, and he is the first Flash author I've read who emphasizes story, story, story as the motivation and prime mover of what he does. In fact he is possibly the first well-known and well-respected designer who has had the guts to come out and say such a thing.

In a rerun of the legend of the blind men and the elephant, people have perceived the Web as they want to, based on personal interests. Hence technologists seeing it as a technology problem, IT (IS, for North American readers) specialists see it as an IT solution, programmers assuming it is a programming exercise, traditional graphic designers seeing websites as a collection of pages like those in a book, and corporate marketing communications types treating websites as online brochures.

They are all partially right. Websites can be some or all of these things, but the Web itself is about communication and storytelling. In its short history few people have perceived this fact, and even fewer have pointed it out in public. Bravo Hillman.

Putting It Into Perspective.
Put it all into perspective, place the web and the Internet up there alongside all the other new communications technologies that came before them, consider what they're all there for and it becomes dead obvious - storytelling. Myths, legends, cave paintings, the written word, telegraph, telephone, radio and TV, and the digital media - they exist for the transmission of tales.

MTIV reminds us of that fact and more. Its subtitle is Process, Inspiration and Practice. In the Inspiration section Curtis shares some of the works by artists works in non-digital media that inspire him, and in Process he explains the practices that have made his firm such a success - Listen, Unite, Theme, Concept, Eat The Audience (you have to read to understand it), Filter and Justify. What he shares in Process is enough to justify the cost of the book.

In Practice Curtis hands the story over to some guest experts for the telling, and they include Steve Krug on usability, Jeff Southard on XML, The Rooster Design Group (the book's designers) on print, Leatrice Eiseman on color, and Ellen Shapiro on grids. All good stuff and worthy, but I have more of the same in many other books.

Let's Improve The Naming Of The Parts.
I like that Curtis calls himself a New Media Designer and to what he does as New Media Design. Paradoxically, although New Media Designer is as ambiguous as competing terms like Multimedia Designer, Interactive Designer, or plain old Digital Designer, the former is more open and allows for endless possibilities.

The Web itself keeps changing. Digital technology continues to evolve. The roles that New Media Designers take on will continue to mutate. Hillman Curtis himself has designed for other media including print, directed and designed video projects, and created all kinds of marketing and advertising products, as well as the things you'd expect an innovative Flash expert to have done, all under the name New Media Designer.

I think we should all follow Curtis' lead, and be done with inventing new titles for what we do. New Media Designer is good enough for me. So are Hillman Curtis' processes as a designer, and I will be adding his personal inspirations to my own...