let me count the ways…
This article from Smashing Magazine is absolutely brilliant. It talks about layout and rules in different disciplines that can be applied into designing web pages. These being the rule of thirds and the golden ration. There is some extremely compelling writing and examples included also. Images for eye candy and preview, hit the link to go to the actual article.
The Golden Ratio
The rule of thirds
One of the things that I really love about Information Architecture is that it is firmly rooted in the Arts rather than Science. Like any art form, there’s room for best practices and conventions in there, but the real beauty lies in the knowledge of convention and subtle disruptions and improvements on that best practice that add to an overall picture.
One of the things that makes IA an art in the way that anthropology is part of the Arts Faculty in a university is understanding the cultural viewpoints that lead to websites. For example I have been looking at the Beijing Olympics website a lot at the moment, and there is a clear tendency towards what seems to be somewhat of an Eastern mindset that the page value lies in how much information is available in one space and the variety of the media that is used to portray that information. It is why the official Beijing 2008 website sits on the hefty side of 500 or so kilobytes. But this whole subject has led to looking at some of the Olympic posters from the years gone by. And this in turn provided the forum to look objectively at the way that different cultures dealt with providing a poster (piece of advertising) that would encompass such a grand global occasion. It is really an interesting case study into a subject where a static medium – in this case a poster to represent the Olympic Games – has been treated across different cultures. In a similar way that XHTML and CSS combine to portray a front page or a contact page and what is valued in that data across the many cultures of the world. But have a look and see the progression through the decades and also the subtle nuances of culture.
As everyone knows with the sheer volume of information being digitally produced on a yearly basis now, Digital Rights Management (DRM) is a big issue. Music companies have been seemingly floundering on what to do about an ever increasing amount of piracy.
But in the face of all the old school flaccid record companies whipping themselves into a frenzy and trying to nail water to a wall by further alienating their audiences with DRM idiocies such as Sony’s root kit debacle, Trent Reznor seems like an artist who understands the power of the web as an information platform. The fact that there is a NineInchNails flickr account with official photography that is released under a Creative Commons license is case in point that Reznor is web savvy. The release of his new album Ghosts from his website and the structure of the packages available for download is nothing short of pure genius. The Ghosts website states that the album contains “Almost two hours of new music composed and recorded over an intense ten week period last fall”. Navigate through to the order page, and you’ll see that there are several options for obtaining a copy of this new album, and also that 2500 copies of the limited edition $300 package are sold out. So thats $750,000 up front which seems like a pretty reasonable start on album sales. But by structuring the packages with varying levels of benefit ie. - ” $75 Deluxe Edition: Ghosts I-IV in a hardcover fabric slipcase containing: 2 audio CDs, 1 data DVD with all 36 tracks in multi-track format, and a Blu-ray disc with Ghosts I-IV in high-definition 96/24 stereo and accompanying slideshow.” Reznor has included something for everyone. I downloaded the 9 free tracks, and I must say they are very good.
I’m definitely going to pay the $5 and get all 36 tracks based on the “taster” above.
So how does this relate back to Information Architecture? It’s important to have a good understanding of web technology, and even more important to understand trends and where the web is going. Creative Commons is growing bigger, and will only get better. And as people who understand these things like Trent Reznor advocate Creative Commons in an innovative and exciting way, the bar will get raised across the board so that not only will consumers be delivered products that they want, and are excited by - but the artists will also get exactly what they deserve for their work.
Go - click on the image below and download it, it’s good:
Here’s a sketch that I put together when I needed a bit of creative out time with no consequences. It is 1000 x 150 which means that it shouldn’t take up too much room and should work well on a 1024 x 768 format screen (which is currently the majority of the world apparently). It’s nice and generic and comes in four different colours for your header viewing pleasure. The style is a little bit grunge mixed with the slightest amount of web2.0. If you want to download the zip file with all four different colours it is in the downloads section.
I'm an Information Architect working in Wellington New Zealand who deals a lot with web standards, conventions and best practice every day. This is the place where I place findings, musings and facts as a repository for myself and anyone else who might benefit. 
