{"action":"created","comment":{"url":"https://api.github.com/repos/dockyard/reefpoints/pulls/comments/38780149","id":38780149,"diff_hunk":"@@ -0,0 +1,31 @@\n+---\n+layout: post\n+title: \"Define: Functional Decoration\"\n+author: 'Steven Trevathan'\n+twitter: 'strevat'\n+social: true\n+summary: 'Due diligance to repair a meaningful technique'\n+published: true\n+tags: design, design process, user experience\n+---\n+\n+If you’re unfamiliar with the implications of decoration in design, a good first start is to read Beatrice Warde’s [“The Crystal Goblet, or Printing Should Be Invisible”](http://gmunch.home.pipeline.com/typo-L/misc/ward.htm). It sums up fairly well a belief I carry to the products we produce at DockYard.\n+\n+Designers working in graphic, industrial, architectural, and user experience design have experienced many phases of decorative design followed by a great decorative purge. A most recent example of this is the explosion of “flat design” and aggression turned toward all things skeuomorphic. This was inevitable, and I welcome the sea change.\n+\n+However, in all of these industries, you will find naysayers of the purge remain. The way they explain their stance may not exemplify much thought on the issue: they “like” decoration, they find that it “adds life” to something that would otherwise be boring. It’s easy for us to dismiss the ideas as coming from people with little design pedigree, but their understanding of why they like decoration is hard for them to explain because they **feel** the function of it. And come on, we all know how hard it is to explain our feelings.\n+\n+I think if we’re able to open our hearts a little to unpopular beliefs, we’ll find that decoration does indeed have a role in design. I think that role could be called Functional Decoration.\n+\n+Good content paired with a Functional Decoration can create a new context through which expectations shift, or distort our sense of \"normal”, and allow us to better understand something. Doing this also allows us to exemplify the experience of a thing (a process, an event, a product, a concept, a history) without having to explicitly detail it.\n+\n+If you don’t believe in that, can you tell me if you felt real emotions when seeing Inside Out, Up, Spirited Away, or Princess Mononoke? If we stripped the “decorative” medium from these films we would have a very different experience. I think proponents for moderate use of decoration are experiencing something similar to trying to convince someone who refuses to watch anything but live action films that animated films can be a meaningful story, too.\n+\n+In this way, Functional Decoration extends the readers imagination to help their mind do the dirty work of turning text into imagined expectations of an experience. Done well, it can be much better than the content on its own.\n+\n+Examples of Functional Decoration:\n+* [XOXOs changing background pattern and use of overlay yellow on blue.](http://2015.xoxofest.com/) The absence of photography, the unabashed use of a basic but vibrant blue and yellow, and the dynamic overlaying shapes describe an inclusive nature of their event well: “you're with friends, it's ok to be you here”\n+* [Super-Loopers \"pixellated\" visuals](http://superlooper.universlabs.co.uk/) pay homage to the environment that inspired the software but also act as a visual description of the sound you're hearing.\n+* [Bloomberg’s \"What is Code?\"](http://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2015-paul-ford-what-is-code/) by Paul Ford uses graphics and pattern as Functional Decoration in that they themselves are illustrations of the content. They facilitate a sometimes humorous and other times very awe-struck wonder of the origins of computing and its concentric cultures.","path":"source/posts/2015-09-04-define-functional-decoration.md","position":29,"original_position":29,"commit_id":"ba389b1de47ff4daa664166272daa06770b02199","original_commit_id":"ba389b1de47ff4daa664166272daa06770b02199","user":{"login":"rgbcolor","id":6465236,"avatar_url":"https://avatars.githubusercontent.com/u/6465236?v=3","gravatar_id":"","url":"https://api.github.com/users/rgbcolor","html_url":"https://github.com/rgbcolor","followers_url":"https://api.github.com/users/rgbcolor/followers","following_url":"https://api.github.com/users/rgbcolor/following{/other_user}","gists_url":"https://api.github.com/users/rgbcolor/gists{/gist_id}","starred_url":"https://api.github.com/users/rgbcolor/starred{/owner}{/repo}","subscriptions_url":"https://api.github.com/users/rgbcolor/subscriptions","organizations_url":"https://api.github.com/users/rgbcolor/orgs","repos_url":"https://api.github.com/users/rgbcolor/repos","events_url":"https://api.github.com/users/rgbcolor/events{/privacy}","received_events_url":"https://api.github.com/users/rgbcolor/received_events","type":"User","site_admin":false},"body":"concentric 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