Jeffrey Zeldman talked about art direction vs. design last week, and mentioned something that’s been on my mind for a long time. I’ll quote him at length:

Many design curricula encourage their students to develop a unique visual vocabulary (a style) that can be grafted onto any real-world project, regardless of its audience or message. Most superstars of print or web design have followed that advice. Their work is about their sensibility, not about the product or service. It communicates, at most, that the product or service is cool or edgy.

Design no longer serves the product; the product serves the design. The product is merely a vehicle allowing the designer to express his vision. Thus design becomes a commodified version of fine art (and practically the only version of fine art that pays).

Zeldman lays out an accurate analysis of the current state of web design — look at the web design award winners — the sites are usually highly attractive, stylized, unusable sites, where the potential empowerment of the target audience is usurped as a monument to the designer.

Why, then, is successful art direction hard to find on web sites while stylized self-indulgence appears everywhere?

Obviously, the web as a medium must be utilitarian — you can’t turn the physical pages with your hands, so the UI must be omnipresent. Since standard HTML UI is considered ugly (and displayed differently by each OS and browser), or blue underlined links are inconvenient for a particular design (guilty as charged), the UI is invented uniquely by every web designer out there. And as with any physical product from toothbrushes to sneakers, the design is stylized, ideally, but not commonly, as a continuation of the brand.

The UI makes up most of the visual information that a visitor sees. That’s why web designer is commonplace while web art director is not. Magazine sites can’t fill their index pages with cover images (i.e., traditional art direction) because if people can’t immediately find the table of contents on the web, they’ll go somewhere else. So the role of art direction on the web becomes subordinate — the art direction is in the subsidiary editorial artwork — there are no full spreads.

Even sites that display some degree of art direction in their content (like Salon, Slate and Jugglezine), the UI design still visually defines the site, however subtle or overpowering it may be.

But this is getting beside the point. Because the medium doesn’t allow obvious opportunities for art direction doesn’t mean web sites must be exploited agents for the designers’ commodified fine art. Art direction on the web is about matching appropriate UI style with the brand, setting tone and enforcing consistency across microsites and ad hoc digital media, working with the designer to balance usable functionality and accessibility of content for the end user (no extra plug-ins necessary).

And as with any product from toothbrushes to sneakers, everyone involved must observe the target audience using the site and make changes accordingly. If sites achieve these goals and are still nice to look at, the web will have come a long way.