I recently hooked up with an old college mate in LinkedIn who has his own design agency. His website was designed in Flash. The site was gorgeous, well designed, clean, simple, great typography and showcased his product offering elegantly. BUT, there was not a hint of optimization to be found.

I recently went to a well-known SEO guru’s website who must get a gazillion hits per month and was visually-offended by the lack of design on his site. Design was such an afterthought on this site that any respectable designer would puke. BUT, the content was amazing and is now bookmarked on my computer.

So who is more successful? The beautifully-designed website or the beautifully-optimized website? Can design and SEO co-exist?

It is in this designers opinion YES.

Content is king in this day and age. And good content is a balance between quantity and quality. Quantity is beneficial to robots (search engines) and Quality is beneficial to humans. And good design, especially good typography, assists the reader in reading your great content.

Good design orchestrates the entire process. It navigates the reader, it speaks. For example, if you we’re having a human conversation and spoke in a monotone manner how would you be perceived regardless of your content. On the other hand, if you ever listened to a dynamic speaker like Tony Robins, you will notice that his delivery is anything but monotone. The variations in his delivery reinforce his message. He raises his voice, he lowers his voice, he weaves and bobs, he pauses. This is all to reinforce his message. This does not mean the monotone guy has nothing important to say, it means that Tony Robins or a Tony Robins-like delivery resonates better.

So effective design and SEO are inextricably linked. And isn’t the point of great content to be read. Imagine the best of both worlds where you have great content, optimized with killer SEO married with great design. AWESOME.

It didn’t match. It didn’t match the sturdy stuff on the platforms. The standard typeface, good ol’ Helvetica, that is applied (mostly) consistently across the system. Say what you will about Helvetica (and there’s much to say, if you saw the film last year), I never realized how comforting I found the signage of the subway system. (Pardon the fuzzy phone photos.)

Because, really, I don’t have anything against whatever it is in use – and I haven’t figured out what it is yet (close to Hel. compressed, but not quite). It was just so … foreign. And it toyed with me. A condensed here, and right next to it, a roman, and then an extended width. My mind raced: would I be waiting 20 minutes for a train? Would my beloved A Express go local? Were there signal problems on the line? Would I have to take the D and walk 30 blocks?

Perhaps as a designer, I’m more visually sensitive than some. But it hit home for me in that moment: design matters. Choice of typeface matters. Consistency in application matters. I never realized how reassuring I found the stability and clarity of the subway signs.

Days later, I’ve come to appreciate the quirky temporary signs. But I still don’t trust them as much as if they were in Helvetica.

Awesome work, especially considering the pace at which a weekly magazine works. And it wasn’t just the design and the conceptual take on the subject matter; it was the photography (no stock!!) and the illustrations. One artist’s work in particular struck me: Sam Winston. He does a lot of work with words, and letters.

These pages from the NYT magazine were especially intriguing (scroll down past the cover on his site). I haven’t been so amused by looking at words in a while. Granted, it’s unlikely that this sort of solution will work for anything I’m currently assigned to, but it was refreshing to think about using text in this crazy sort of way. However, it’s possible that an element, a piece of it, could work it’s way in somewhere…

We get into our routines, and sadly, can easily get into a rut. It’s just good to be reminded that there’s always another way of looking at things.