Star Wars

August 22, 2010

I’m a 32 year old male. Like a lot of my demographic I grew up with Star Wars. I loved Star Wars. I still love Star Wars, although in truth I love the memories of Star Wars more.

My memories from being 8 years old are wanting to be Luke Skywalker and playing with the figures and having my own epic battles with X-Wings and speeder bikes.

Getting Emotional

Now though, I don’t get excited about specific characters or events in the films, (and I’m talking original 3 films here) but much more about the general ‘feel’ of the film. Star Wars is set in distinct environments: the desert of Tatooine, the ice of Hoth, the clouds of Bespin, the forest of Endor and the industrial man made constructions of space ships and space stations.

George Lucas had a clear vision of each location, and by having such clear cut differences between them it makes memory and recognition of each so much stronger. In the most recent 3 films, the settings are richer, but generally less distinct. For me the strongest scenes in the recent films were the final scenes of Revenge of the Sith. After the polish of the films thus far, it suddenly reverts back to the look of the original films. Inside Darth Vaders new shuttle that looks exactly as it did in Jedi, and then Luke’s Aunt and Uncle looking out at the suns on Tatooine.

Lucas couldn’t get all the special effects he wanted in the first films, what we got instead was a powerful essence of his vision. The technical limitations on the special effects made the spirit of the films more powerful.

When Lucas had no technical limitations, the CGI took over and the spirit of the films was lost. Not until the very end when the film recreated the look of the original films did the essence return.

And how does this relate to web design?

The strongest connections I have with Star Wars are certainly emotional. I’m hard pressed to give specific explanations of what I am still enthralled about. But it proves to me the importance of a ‘vision’ when you are creating something. Quite what your vision is can be very difficult to get on paper or describe to a client - it’s intuition and gut feeling. You instinctively know if a requested image will fit with the vision of your website, the website owner might not.

But if you want your creation to be great you need to fight for your vision. Even if the fight is somewhat blind. Users will ‘get’ this vision subconsciously, but in the short term might not fall into place when assessed objectively.

Recreating the essence of Star Wars

The dark lens series by Cedric Delsaux gets me going because it captures the vision of Star Wars. It goes in on an emotional level, not as a narrative.

I really bought into Justin Van Genderen’s Star Wars prints because they are abstracted far away from recognisable Star Wars elements. You probably wouldn’t make the connection to Star Wars on most of them if they didn’t have the planet name written on. But this is good. You see a graphical design, then you read the name and you suddenly go ‘ oh yeah - I see Endor now’. And the recognition of planet is down to colour. And your association with colour is an emotional one. So again your relationship with these posters (assuming you’re a life-long Star Wars fan) is emotional, not rational.

And what has prompted me to write these thoughts is a series of photographs I saw on Wired.com of Saturn. They’re inspiring in their own right, but the two that got me excited were the two that reminded me of Star Wars. They show a moon orbiting Saturn and I instantly thought: Death Star!

Partly it’s colour, the very grey photographs are very Imperial-esque. There’s a sense of menace with this big overpowering planet in the background and the moon looking dwarfed. But more than any of that - it reminds me of the shots from Star Wars of the Death Star in orbit around Endor.

Back to emotions

It all goes to show how strong emotional attachment is. As designers we should have a strong ability to asses our work with a gut reaction. An emotional reaction. And in the long term it can prove to be more successful than any objective design decisions made by committee.

John O’Nolan wrote this article recently which deals with this concept of grabbing people by their emotions on a more practical level. By that I mean real-world examples of how designing to affect emotions can be successful. The responses I’ve discussed above relating to Star Wars are at an extreme end of the emotional attachment scale. They incorporate not just a single movie, or even trilogy - but years of my life (as a child too so probably even more impressionable), going beyond just watching the films to playing the films, recreating scenes in my garden ... but it serves to highlight to me the power of the subconscious and the importance as a designer in allowing yourself to be led by intuition and the importance for client’s to not resort to designing by commity where the unifying vision of the designer will be lost in objectivity. Objectivity’s fine on paper, but it doesn’t engage in the real world where your users are reacting to you emotionally.

This article is written by John Cowen, owner of Mekonta - a small web design studio in Exeter, Devon.