Inadequate Design on Campus

Design plays an extremely important role in a person’s everyday life. Whether or not it is realized good design improves the quality of life for all who come into contact with it. When the inanimate objects that people interact with have reason and purpose information travels quickly and easily. The problem is that for whatever reason bad design goes unnoticed and is not a priority for those who are making decisions. People assume that if they are paying well for a service they are getting their monies worth by hiring “professionals”. In my opinion one of the last places that bad design should exist is on a college campus. A place where good ideas should be nurtured and encouraged, in reality is a place where good ideas are ignored. I believe that if an institution such as SUNY New Paltz is truly confident in the ability of its professors and in the quality of the education it is providing for its students, their ears should be wide open to new ideas. Unfortunately, I’m not completely convinced that this is the case.

These days when people need information there’s no hesitation to sit down at a computer and type in a question at popular search engine. When it comes to choosing a college most people would sooner visit the school’s website before visiting the campus. Many schools spend an exorbitant amount of money on a site that captures the overall atmosphere it would like to portray. When considering whether or not to enroll into a college one would expect to view a site both appealing to the eye combined with easily accessible information. When trying to find answers to questions about a school it would be a great disappointment to stumble upon an error page or an unpleasant mess of unorganized material. Unfortunately, www.newpaltz.edu boasts an array of inadequate mistakes. For example, when first coming to http://lib.newpaltz.edu/ there is some confusion on what the users options are. There are links moving from left to right and top to bottom. The links texts appear in white on a blue box, while the rest of the sites background is rendered in white. The major problem with this site is the hierarchy of the text. The user has no way of separating important information from insignificant information. Another example would have to be the school’s bookstore site. If you go to http://www.newpaltz.edu/academics/ you’ll see a link that says bookstore. After hitting the link you’ll find an error page, http://www.newpaltz.edu/cas/books.html. If the user types in http://www.newpaltz.edu/cas/bookstore.html it will bring them to an extremely unattractive site with little information. The user then needs to find one more link to finally get to where they want to go. The problem here is that this site is not easily accessible. Tim Brown is a former professor at SUNY New Paltz and also teaches at Vassar College. He taught Vis Lang 2 and had also contributed to the Vassar College site. The final project that he assigned for his class involved redesigning either SUNY New Paltz’s CAS website or Vassar College’s English Department website and to provide a detailed document outlining and justifying the design and development decisions made during the redesign. When asked if New Paltz had approached him at any time concerning the schools site he replied no. When asked if he had any interest in improving the schools site he replied yes. Why Tim Brown was given the opportunity to contribute to Vassar’s site and not New Paltz is undetermined.

The New Paltz website isn’t the only tool that the school uses to bring information to the public. There are a number of brochures and pamphlets available for both potential students and those who are already enrolled. Unfortunately, many of these brochures are riddled with bad text, horrible composition, and pixilated imagery. New Paltz’s “Guide to On-Campus Living” is a perfect example. The cover of the pamphlet consists of centered type on an orange background. Three different typefaces are used and a collage of condensed, low quality images run from left to right with no margin. When we open the brochure we see a composition comparable to a text book. The main problem with this booklet is the quality of the images. The majority of them have been stretched so far past their capacity that they appear blurry and difficult to process. Others are so small that they don’t even grab the viewer’s attention. It’s disturbing to think that this problem could be solved by just using a decent digital camera. What’s more disturbing is that both those who provided the images and those who used them realized that there was a problem. The type and image course offered at SUNY New Paltz gives design students an opportunity to educate themselves on how these two subjects relate to each other. Students are also given a chance to create their own brochure comprised of their own type and imagery. Many of these brochures are connected with New Paltz in one way or another and are rendered in an extremely professional way. Instead of outsources these projects New Paltz could easily look to a handful of their most gifted students to complete these projects. This would not only give New Paltz the opportunity to show pride in their school but also to show pride in the work of its students.

In conclusion, there is a number of design problems associated with this campus. It seems senseless for an institution to hire and train professionals just to show no interest in how they can benefit from them. There is no way to tell how beneficial it would be for both parties if the choice to commit ion design students to work on school projects became a reality.