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Outside Of The Box

by Parker Torrence

The challenge: place nine points in a three by three grid. Now, without lifting the point of your pen, draw four straight lines to connect all nine points (see figure 1).


figure 1

From the beginning of recorded history, humans have had a habit of defining their environment within boundaries. These boundaries have varied from city walls that once kept the barbarian chaos away, to modern buildings controlling the temperature of our environment, to the less substantial class separations that still exists in some cultures today. It could almost be safe to say that humans as a whole have a subconscious need to place everything inside of some type of box. Mail is sorted into boxes, shoes are sold in boxes, there are lunch boxes, tool boxes, jewelry boxes, and let us not forget, boxes of wine. With the use of latitude and longitude lines, the whole world can be divided down into very small boxes. Humans like to think in boxes, it helps to remove some of the chaos and keep us sane in a world overflowing with data. The problem is that sometimes we become trapped inside these boxes.

Setting aside the social-economic aspects of this topic, we shall examine the validness of Box Thinking and its relationship with Web Design.

So what is Box Thinking? On the very mundane level, it is the size of your desk top, your office, your home or your city. It is the idea that what you need, you already have. Trained from an early age to acknowledge these often less then physical limitations, we go through life struggling to find all of our solutions inside of our box. The problem is that sometimes not all of the answers are inside of our box.

Most of us can see the basic flaw to this form of thinking, yet many still practice it on a daily basis. Granted in the past few years the multiplication of Internet search engines have expanded the research/information box from the size of the local library to potentially that of the world by way of the web. Even a search engine can become a new kind of box if you do not utilize it fully and correctly.

So how do we know if we are thinking inside of a box? (Have you found a solution to the challenge posed at the beginning of this article yet? If not, keep reading.) Finding the sides of the box can be as simple as a voice (inside of your head, or someone external) saying, "That can't be done!" or "No one does it like that!" (or statements to that effect). Yet when questioned, the statement fails to produce a valid logical reason why it can not be done. Much of the time the sides of our box simply expose the edge of our knowledge base. Sometimes it is a little more substantial, exposing the limits of the technology being used.

Box Thinking in Web Design is all too often established by the software being used. Templates and WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editors have contributed to an overabundance of design limitations. Screen resolution, browser incompatibility issues, a limited (web-safe) color palette and variations in download times have further added to Box Thinking.

Examples of Box Thinking in Web Design: Navigation must be on the left. Web pages must scroll vertical, never horizontal. All domains must have a splash page that serves no practical purpose. Text on web pages should be 535 pixels wide. When designing for an 800 pixel wide monitor the maximum width should be 760 pixels wide. If it works in Microsoft's Internet Explorer, it should work in every browser. You can only use 216 colors to design with.

Some of the above boxes have valid logic (e.g. text should be 535 pixels wide, this can allow for correctly formatted printing), while some boxes, were valid once but are no longer.

A perfect example of a once valid box would be web-safe colors. In the days of 8-bit monitors, it was sane and safe to design within the structure of the 216 color palette. Now with monitors displaying 16-bit, 24-bit or even 36-bit color, designing with only web-safe colors is restricting yourself to a box that has no valid limitation. (As discovered by David Lehn and Hadley Stern in Death of the Websafe Color Palette? (September 6, 2000), of the 216 colors, only 22 can still be truly called web-safe.)

Have you found a solution to the challenge yet? Sometimes to find an answer is as simple as getting a different perspective on the problem. You could always follow the example set in the movie "Dead Poet Society" and stand on a chair. Granted if you do this at work you might gain some strange looks from your co-workers but it could also provide a new way of viewing your problem.

One (but not the only) solution to the challenge is shown in figure 2.

figure 2

The majority of people when seeing the solution, will say something to the effect of "That is cheating, you went outside of the box!" The sad fact is that there was no box. The reality is that most will see a box around the dots (see figure 3) and it is this illusionary obstacle that will stop them from finding, what in hindsight is a very simple solution.


figure 3

Many of the problems we face daily in Web Design are just as illusionary as the box around the dots. What the box represents is our safety zone. The tried, the true, the tested, and the known to be safe. The area outside of the box is the unknown, the untested and sometimes just plain risky. Not everyone is cut out to think outside of the box. Most people don't want to be the first to try something new. It is always safer inside of the box.

Take a risk and “Think Outside of the Box” you may discover that is where your creative edge is sleeping. (You remember your creative edge, the one you had back in school before you went to work.) To get you started here is a new challenge: place nine points in a three by three grid. Now, without lifting the point of your pen, draw one straight line to connect all nine points.

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