 Computers can quickly assemble and display one- time confections designed to serve immediate, local, unique purposes. Right from the start, this opening panel shows the scope of information made available. Free of icons, decorative logotypes, and navigation apparatus, about 90% of the image is substance, a contextual overview describing, the reservoir of data. In an architecture of content, the information becomes the interface. Rather than sequentially stacking up little bits of data to be unveiled gradually, this flat interface sufaces more than 45 options at once, distrubuting the information in space rather than time. Computers can quickly assemble and display one- time confections designed to serve immediate, local, unique purposes. Right from the start, this opening panel shows the scope of information made available. Free of icons, decorative logotypes, and navigation apparatus, about 90% of the image is substance, a contextual overview describing, the reservoir of data. In an architecture of content, the information becomes the interface. Rather than sequentially stacking up little bits of data to be unveiled gradually, this flat interface sufaces more than 45 options at once, distrubuting the information in space rather than time.  More generic approaches to interface design are widespread. With tedious desicions in tiny irritating steps context and overview is lost. Only 18% of the space in the next example depicts substantitive information (photographers and their work). An astonishing 82% of the screen is devoted to computer administrative debris or to nothing at all. Another weak approach is to make the interface itself a noticed visual statement, with a great deal of creative effort going into styling and masking an information dump. Believed to be boring and in need of decorative spice, the content becomes trivialized and incindental. Thin substance and over-produced styling. This is the difference between the graphic designer and the information architect. The effect of graphic design in many publications is the subordination of the text...The broken page delivers impressions and even sensations, but it does not lead a reader into the depth that carefully elaborated ideas, crafted writing, and layered passages can create.- Joseph Giovani |
Direct measurement of content and non-content provides a quantitative assessment of an interface. These measures include:
- the proportion of space on the screen devoted to content, to computer administration, and to nothing at all.
- character counts and measures of typographic density
- the number of computer commands immediately available (the more the better, if clearly displayed)