German web design minimalist Dirk Hesse excels in simplicity. In fact, his personal website, which is styled in CSS and structured in XHTML, receives raves by markup experts wherever it’s seen. For example, Jeffrey Zeldman - officially one of the website design world’s brightest luminaries and apparently Hesse’s muse - once offhandedly blogged of Hesse, that his design is “textbook minimalism, clean and hard as three chord rock”. We at Web Design Library wholeheartedly agree with this succinct assessment. We chose his site for “Usability of the Month” in November. There’s nothing more to say. His website speaks, or rather sings, for itself.
WDL: When did you first become interested in web design and why?
Dirk Hese: In 1997 I bought a modem and a license of Netscape 4 (!); shortly after that I decided to have my own website. It wasn't so much the process of designing that fascinated me but the fact that every person in the world would have the possibility to visit the site. Of course, nobody did. Later I recognised how great it is to put elements together in order to create a whole.
WDL: Have you ever been a production line designer? If so, for whom did you work? And can you tell us the funniest workgroup story you can recall?
Dirk Hese: What exactly do you mean by production line design? Do you mean if I store designs? No, every client gets an individual design.
When I'm working for agencies, I do work like scaling images, copying and pasting content, if you mean that.
As to the funny story: I'm from Germany . As you surely know, there are no funny things happening over here. Vee are always very zerious.
There was this client who wanted to have a design for his online shop. We made him a proposal: nice layout, slick typography, pleasant colours. Not bad, he said. But shortly after that he sent a package containing a folder and a letter announcing his new design. There it was glued on black cardboard: large areas of Jakob Nielsen purple and dark grey, all set in a blend of Comic Sans and aliased 20px Arial. It was made by his sister-in-law or someone like that. We shivered, we argued, but there was no way, he wanted to have it exactly like that. No one involved ever wanted to campaign with the project. The strange thing is that the site's still running after being online for years. And it's even uglier now than at that time.
WDL: What was the breaking point? When and why did you decide to become a freelance web designer?
Dirk Hese: After working part time besides college for some time, I somehow found myself self-employed. Anyway, I have the feeling that nowadays companies don't hire as much people as they did some years ago. Freelancers are cheaper and you can easily kick them out when you no longer need them.
On the other hand, I never really considered being in permanent employment and I'm glad I haven't had to be. You can't beat dealing from eye to eye with clients and using your own head to solve problems. Being simply someone's helping hand isn't what I wanted to do.
WDL: Your motto is, if we translated your words well, the following: “I make Web Designs which are user friendly and long-lived.” What do you consider long-lived? What about designs which become outdated? Can we assume that this means that you provide service support and guarantees for your websites?
Dirk Hese: My aim is to design stuff that is independent from short-lived fashion styles. Style is most often redundant. Fulfilling a purpose is what information or web design should be about. Designing means to use your head, not to decorate nicely, be it with kitsch or some trendy stuff.
The more style you put in a design, the earlier it gets outdated. From the viewpoint of a salesperson that might be the best thing to happen. But design is not equal to advertisement.
The greatest products have the least style. For example, take Jonathan Ives' work for Apple, great functional product design. While his work is often described as just being chic or fancy, most likely Ives can give a reason for every detail, although one might argue that the G5 iMac has some details which are subordinated to the form - e.g. the ports on the back.
WDL: If we understood you right, your philosophy is that “There are no dumb users and no bad browsers, but there is front-end design.” What led you to develop such philosophy? When was the breaking point when you said, “OK, #@*^#$%, no more heavy tables and graphics!”
Dirk Hese: It's "There are no dumb users, just badly designed sites (things)". People often feel ashamed when they cannot handle devices. I think that's a totally wrong approach. If they don't understand it, it's simply bad design. It's not people's duty to discover, it's the designer's duty to easily communicate. Take highway signs: almost no way to do something wrong. Or the Model One Radio [ http://www.tivoliaudio.com/product.php?productid=139&cat=&page=1 ] . So easy to use. That's great design.
I don't like complicated things (save the Forever Changes album by Love) and I hate it when a design gets complicated because people put too much of their ego in it. Devices that do not work sometimes cause physical pain to me. It's embarrassing, but I once smashed my car radio when getting frantic about it. By the way, in my opinion, car radios are the most badly designed things of all. Very difficult to use – i.e. not understandable. Even for someone who doesn't have to maneuver a car at the same time. Too many options and tiny buttons with cryptic names. I never found out what the "ASI" and "mLu" buttons were good for. Ordinary radios do not have buttons like that, do they?
As to the tables: I think it was Zeldman's ALA article from 2001 or thereabout that made me move to tableless design and change my mind. However, I don't have problems with heavy graphics as long as they make sense.
WDL: According to a quote located on your site, web designer Jeffrey Zeldman called your site “an example of textbook minimalism, clean and hard as three chord rock.” Apparently you agree with this assessment; otherwise, you wouldn't have used the quote. The question I have for you is how would you describe Zeldman's site? If yours is an example of textbook minimalism, then his is an example of textbook XXXXX? Explain your response.
Dirk Hese: Hm, you would use every quote by somebody like Jeffrey Zeldman as a testimonial, wouldn't you?
I would describe Mr. Zeldman's site as textbook understatement or unassumingness. He is probably one of the best-known web designers in the world and he's done great things for the web design community. But I never read anything swanky by him. He lets his work and his expertise speak for him. Not a single empty phrase.
WDL: Of the eight projects listed on your website, which was your favorite? Which was the most challenging?
Dirk Hese: [I recently updated the projects site.]
The most challenging project in the last time was probably writing the stylesheets for a big standards-compliant corporate website that I was contracted to work on. The site had to be built very accurately and although you can design exactly with CSS, it was very hard to have every pixel look the same in all popular browsers. It was also a challenge to keep the stylesheets relatively slim because of a huge amount of different elements and nuggets on the site.
My favourite projects are probably my own sites. When you are your own client, you still have the challenge of designing a usable and efficient website, but without the usual corporate restrictions. That's nice.
WDL: How were the jobs different and how were they the same?
Dirk Hese: Jobs are almost always the same, at least a big part of them, I think. Creating mockups, the site's architecture, templates, thinking about how to power the site, dealing with all the little problems. It's the client that makes the difference. You know that feeling, when you first see their logo or colors and think: "Oh boy!" May it be good or bad. It's both their material and the people themselves. I am very happy to have had the opportunity to almost always work with nice people.
WDL: Tell us about your work for The Rosettes. Was it your first album cover? Did you make all the graphics yourself?
Dirk Hese: Yes, it was my first album cover. The Rosettes are a punk rock band with a retro-50s/60s touch and they wanted an appropriate cover. So we choose to heavily cite legendary 1960s designer Saul Bass and tried to create an accordingly styled artwork, blended with lots of "Back To The Future" references. Pretty postmodern approach, isn't it? I have actually become allergic to all those historicising styles, but I have to admit in this case it was really fun. And the client wanted it that way. It also made me consider that graphic design is a bit different from web design.
WDL: What do you think about the Web Design Library website? Is it user friendly?
Dirk Hese: I like the simple and clean layout, also the colors. The design is never pretentious; it's dedicated to its purpose. And it has very good URLs. It's functional and that's meant as a compliment. I don't think there are usability issues, but I also have to say that I would appreciate if there wasn't the need to log-in to certain areas of the site.
WDL: Your website was chosen as Usability Site of the Month. What do you think about other websites of the month – what's your favorite?
Dirk Hese: Well, I really don't feel entitled to criticize the work of others. But I always liked the Apple site in its various incarnations. Gladly they kicked the Garamond font out - so one can finally use it again ;-)
WDL: If you could fulfill one web design fantasy, what would it be?
Dirk Hese: I really would like to know what legendary German designer and keen thinker Otl Aicher would have had to say about the web. He died all too soon in 1991. Well, redesigning Lee Hazlewood's website wouldn't be too bad either.
WDL: Thank you for the interview.
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