Design of the Year winner is “boring”, says Mail Online

Mail Online attackes Gov.uk

News: Mail Online – the world’s most popular news website and the winner of a design effectiveness award – has described the gov.uk site that yesterday won the Design Museum’s Design of the Year award as “boring” and “basic-looking”.

Mail Online journalist Rosie Taylor scoffed at the plain and simple look of the Gov.uk website in an article published after the ceremony in London last night, complaining that “it has only two small pictures” and “features links to pages like ‘Housing and local services’”.

“And the award goes to boring.com!” ran the headline on the news site, which earlier this year won the Design Effectiveness Award’s Grand Prix for its huge growth in traffic and advertising revenue since its 2008 redesign.

Gov.uk was designed by Government Digital Service, a team within the cabinet office led by designer Ben Terrett, to combine the UK government’s thousands of online services in a single website that’s meant to be simple and intuitive to use and which uses just one font and dispenses with visual clutter such as images and coloured panels.

The redesign beat over 90 other shortlisted projects and was praised for its elegance and simplicity by Deyan Sudjic, director of the Design Museum that organises the annual awards to recognise “the most innovative and imaginative designs” from the past year.

Watch our movie interview with Ben Terrett filmed in Cape Town as part of our Dezeen and MINI World Tour or read more about the Designs of the Year.

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UK government website wins Designs of the Year 2013

News: the UK government’s redesigned website has been named the Design of the Year in a ceremony at the Design Museum in London this evening (+ movie).

Gov.uk was designed by Government Digital Service, a team within the Cabinet Office led by designer Ben Terrett (see our movie above), to fold the government’s thousands of existing websites into just one.

Deyan Sudjic, director of the award-giving Design Museum, said the new website “makes life better for millions of people”.

Gov.uk wins Designs of the Year 2013

“Gov.uk looks elegant, and subtly British thanks to a revised version of a classic typeface designed by Margaret Calvert back in the 1960s. It is the Paul Smith of websites,” said Sudjic.

“The rest of the world is deeply impressed, and because it has rationalised multiple official websites, it saves the taxpayer millions – what’s not to like?”

Prime minister David Cameron also said he was “delighted” about the win, adding: “For the first time, people can find out what’s happening inside government, all in one place, and in a clear and consistent format.”

Gov.uk wins Designs of the Year 2013

The core idea behind Gov.uk is to make it as simple and intuitive as possible for the user, Terrett told Dezeen in a movie filmed at Design Indaba in Cape Town as part of our Dezeen and MINI World Tour.

“People only go onto government websites once or twice a year to find out a particular thing,” he said. “So people shouldn’t spend time relearning how to use it. The core of all our work is focusing on user need.”

Gov.uk wins Designs of the Year 2013

Terrett’s team devised 10 principles of good design to guide their work and chose to make them public in the hope they would be useful to other designers, as he explained at the Global Design Forum in London last September. “We believe that if you share work it makes it better,” explained Terrett.

The principles are:

1. Start with needs
2. Do less
3. Design with data
4. Do the hard work to make it simple
5. Iterate. Then iterate again
6. Build for inclusion
7. Understand context
8. Build digital services, not websites
9. Be consistent, not uniform
10. Make things open: it makes things better

Terrett also won the graphics category of the 2010 awards with his print-on-demand publishing service Newspaper Club.

The other category winners included the Morph folding wheel in the transport category, the Kit Yamoyo medicine kit in the product category and the brand identity of the Venice Architecture Biennale in the graphics category.

The architecture category was won by a refurbished 1960s tower block in Paris, fashion was won by a film about writer and editor Diana Vreeland and industrial designer Konstantin Grcic won the furniture category for his Medici Chair, after launching a complementary stool and table in Milan last week.

Gov.uk and the other shortlisted designs are on show at the Designs of the Year exhibition at the Design Museum until 7 July.

Last year the award was won by east London designers BarberOsgerby for their London 2012 Olympic Torch – see all news about Designs of the Year.

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“We’re trying to get design out of the way”

Dezeen and MINI World Tour: in our final movie from Design Indaba in Cape Town, Ben Terrett, head of design at Government Digital Service, explains the design principles behind the new Gov.uk website, which combines all the UK Government’s websites into a single site.

“There were thousands of websites, and we folded them into Gov.uk to make just one,” says Terrett. “The reason to do that really is to ensure that the user doesn’t have to understand government to find something out. They just go to one place and it’s there. They don’t have to know which department has what information.”

"Calvert and Kinneir were doing a very similar thing to what we're doing"

Terrett explains that the core idea behind it was to make it as simple and intuitive as possible for the user. “People only go onto government websites once or twice a year to find out a particular thing,” he says. “So people shouldn’t spend time relearning how to use it. The core of all our work is focussing on user need.”

Terrett sought advice from Margaret Calvert, the graphic designer who, along with Jock Kinneir, designed the UK’s road signs, which have been imitated around the world. Terrett cites her work as one of the iconic pieces of British design he took inspiration from: “There is this huge catalogue or canon of projects that have got this fantastic heritage of this public sector sort of design work,” he says, also citing the London Underground tube map and Joseph Bazalgette’s sewer network. “The more you look at it the more they were trying to do a very similar sort of thing to what we’re doing.”

"Calvert and Kinneir were doing a very similar thing to what we're doing"

The Gov.uk site only uses a single font and has been stripped of any graphical flourishes. “Something we’re trying to do in particular is let design get out of the way and let the user get to what they want,” Terrett says. “You shouldn’t come to the website and go: ‘wow, look at the graphic design’. We haven’t yet achieved that in most web interfaces; they’re still getting in the way [and] you can see the graphic design everywhere. We need to get past that.”

"Calvert and Kinneir were doing a very similar thing to what we're doing"

Terrett believes that, with new technology like Google Glass simplifying or even removing the user interface altogether, websites will eventually catch up. “Google Glass and other things that we don’t know about yet will prompt people to think harder and work harder on that stuff,” he says. “But there’s a long way to go and I think it’s a fascinating challenge, a really exciting challenge.”

The Gov.uk website is shortlisted for this year’s Designs of the Year award, alongside high-profile projects such as Renzo Piano’s The Shard and the Olympic Cauldron by Thomas Heatherwick.

"Calvert and Kinneir were doing a very similar thing to what we're doing"

This movie features a MINI Cooper S Countryman.

The music featured is by South African artist Floyd Lavine, who performed as part of the Design Indaba Music Circuit. You can listen to Lavine’s music on Dezeen Music Project.

See all our Dezeen and Mini World Tour reports from Cape Town.

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