how many sites has Elmore Leonard designed?
Wednesday, January 27, 2010 at 9:03PM 
Well, none, I'm guessing, but he's got some brilliant words of wisdom for designers.
"I try to leave out all the bits that people skip."
(Okay, Elmore's talking about writing, but none of the art directors I know would pay attention to a piece of advice about writing, so shhh.)
He talks about how you've got to be able to distance yourself from the work. You have to develop the ability to kick back and say to yourself, that part's pretty and this part is really interesting to me and oooh I loved coming up that – and then realize that anyone else coming to it is going to think all it's a waste of time and skip right over it.
Yes, Virginia. People are going to skip over all the crap that's between them and what they're really interested in.
Users don't give a shit what you're trying to say or how clever you are; they want to start doing what you want them to do. Or rather, what they want to do. (For writing, it means that the eyes of the reader are going to pass right over that page of description of how good looking someone was, or the paragraphs of philosophical perspective, until they get to the point at which the story starts again.)
This sensible wisdom is born out by the fact that the IAs I've worked with have been insistent about concentrating on boring questions like, "What is the one thing you want the user to do on this page?" They then started smacking clever ADs and writers until we pared the page down to focus on that one thing, instead of all the cool/cute bells and whistles that we were thinking somehow made the page, in some vague way. They got Elmore, even if we didn't.
Reader Comments (2)
Very well put Scott (and Elmore). I agree completely, but take umbridge with the fact that you don't think you know ANY art directors that would pay attention to a piece of advice about writing. :)
Okay, slight exaggeration for comic effect. But only slight.