Today’s guest star is Nishant Kothary, who didn’t work on the new amazing and fully responsive Microsoft.com redesign. The comic also features the consequences of the Squirrel’s misunderstanding the concept of “designing with your gut”.
(I wish it was as simple as eating pepperoni pizzas. I would be the best intuitive designer ever.)
Although Nishant did not work on the new design, he did write a great post telling the Story of the New Microsoft.com (and his own small part in that), which is a great piece that looks at what made the new design so amazing. Which it turns out, is a complex, nuanced combination of many factors, including (but not limited to), designing by the gut at times.
When even Gruber says that Microsoft’s new site looks great, you know they’ve hit the ball out of the park. It makes you wonder what kind of world we live in, where suddenly Microsoft’s design aesthetic seems to be, well, awesome. From their new logo and their new site, to the Metro UI (I know, it’s not called that anymore) of Windows 8, they’ve got it going on.
It’s a crazy world.
As great as the Microsoft.com redesign is, the reason for Nishant’s inclusion in today’s comic instead of one of the site’s designer is the meat and morale of his post: In our reality successful websites (or successful projects of any type) are rarely (if ever) in debt to a single underlying cause. Awesome techniques, rockstar designers, understanding management, these may be some of literally dozens of contributing factors. To me this is great, because it means we can learn dozens of valuable lessons by examining these success stories.
Nishant tells the story like this as well, touching on several aspects that made the Microsoft.com redesign the success that it is, then ending by contributing it all to the twenty-five people that were involved in that project.
There was a tweet by Dan Cederholm last week that touched on the topic of what goes into making good websites.
Web design is getting f’ing complex. Biggest concern is for those just starting to learn.
Which, really sums it up. There’s so many aspects to good design that it’s impossible to find a single magic bullet (as awesome as responsive design is.) I appreciate the new Microsoft.com for reminding us that our industry is about a lot more than just buzzwords.