What It Would Be If It Were A Song?
This will look like an off-topic, dear front-end designing/coding friends, but trust me, I will tie it back to design.
I bet you’ve heard the song “Somebody That I Used To Know”, originally by Gotye. Catchy tune, a bit more indie/hippie than I like, but I would give them the lyrics, those are timeless as is the occasional need to do open surgery on our own feelings, because, you know, nobody else understands us.
Original – Indie/hippie
So, the song cought on in major way and even I, who hears radio only in a pub, did hear this one quite often. It was a global hit. Now replaced with much worse.
And as it happens, there sprung up a a lot of cover versions. Take your time, play a few, I will make my point down the road.
“Rock” Cover
“Classic Choir” Cover
“Indie/Emo” Cover
“I-am-playing-my-guitar” Cover
“I-am-playing-my-piano-and-like-really-feel-it” Cover
“Fucking-bad-acting-like-we-really-feel-it” Cover
“Voice-stunt” Cover
Attention Grabbing / One-guitar-stunt Cover
Attention Grabbing Parody of The Attention Grabbing Cover
Actually, I came to know the song through this brilliant parody and I thought the one-guitar-stunt was the original.
Now, to make my point…
…I want to focus purely on the creative aspect of this.
You see what we got here? The basic tempo, tones and lyrics of the original become building blocks and everyone made their own interpretation of it.
What does that remind you of? CSS Zen garden anyone? One set of pieces to play with (blocks of HTML code / content) and many cover versions.
Let’s go more meta. What about common design challenges? Take a login page – login, password, recover password, submit – how many different interpretation of this basic theme have you seen?
Are you with me? Do you think about yourself as someone doing creative work when you are producing yet another login screen? Because you should. You are playing your interpretation of the “login screen” tune.
You’re saying, you are coding CSS? You should feel like you are having a jam with your code, text editor and all of your browsers at least a little bit, brother!
And when we pull it all together, the business model, the code, the colors, the type, the copy, the interactions, the flow… – the design – what it would be if it were a song?