Distantly Yours: Web Design and Photos in Bloomington, IN, by Dan Hiester

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I recently stumbled upon the Edustyle awards page, wanting to see what ideas other designers bring to academic websites. Brown University's gateway definitely has some interesting ideas – interesting enough to win a most innovative award.

At first glance, the most striking thing about this design is how compact it is – almost uncomfortably so. Cramming so much content into so little space makes the layout busy, despite its row-based elegance. However, there are a few ideas to pull away from this design.

4D web design

I've mused in the past that time, the fourth dimension, can be used in web design, and we definitely see this concept applied to Brown's homepage. Only one section of the page is displayed at a time, changing display when the user moves their mouse over another section.

What's interesting to me about this design is that it assumes each user visits this page looking for only one piece of information at a time. Of course, this begs the question: "How often do any of us visit a website intending to look for more than one thing?"

It does look a little busy when you're displaying ten sections, but the technique feels a lot more natural on a page like Brown's web directory, where the concept applies only to the footer. Now, search boxes should usually be closer to the top of the page, so users don't have to scroll to get to them, so I think if Brown put the footer of that its directory somewhere at the top of the pave, they might really be onto something.

Row-based design – to the extreme

Also interesting is the fact that I stumbled upon this site mere weeks after seeing 13 Things' article about row-based design. If you assume that this page endeavors to accomplish little more than direct users to specific departments or offices – each with their own website – this page performs the task of a table of contents very effectively. It leverages rows in a way that vastly improves the scannability of the different categories of links the page presents.

I'm not necessarily a fan of the page's design, but I applaud it for trying something different. Its decision to favor function over form is bold, but perhaps also brash. The challenge, to me, is to find a way to apply these ideas in an implementation that favors form just as much as function. Then, we might be onto something really interesting.