He says… She says…
A couple of months ago I read an article in Computer Arts magazine about gender preferences regarding web design. As I read it, I wanted to scream. Women like soft colors and shapes. Men like bold colors and edges. It was so stereotypical.
Yet, a few weeks later, I started working on a website for a client. There were two partners - a man and a woman. The guy sent me some urls of designs they like. Sharp angles, bold colors, including black. Then the woman sent me a link to site she liked. Soft colors, no black, a composition that created the impression the site was floating on a cloud. Their target audience was relatively equal mix of men and women, so we came to a compromise such as using blue instead of black.
Personally, I prefer designs that the article would classify as masculine. But maybe that's because I've worked mainly for high-tech sites and most of the time I work with men.
I'd be interested to hear your experiences with men and women clients. Do the differences in taste usually conform to the general stereotype?
I don't design as much as I used to, but my designs definately fit on the "masculine" side of things, without being too far out to be obviously gender-specific. I don't think it can be said that a man can't design "feminine" and a woman can't design "masculine". But when it comes to preferences and making choices, I do think the sexes do have different wants out of design and branding.
I love soft colors and designs, but I think men tend to design, draw, and respond to high contrasts more than soft complimentary designs. Call it the pseudo-psychology of branding for image, but clean wins over messy, dramatic over understated, most of the time - until it is taken to an extreme, then no one wants to look at it!
I don't, however, tone my designs down when working with women. I tend to stay strong, because that is also usually the right call for the clients I have worked with. I think the business and the customer define the look, if a business wants to survive. I liken it to the waiting room and board rooms in many companies. You can tell what they think of themselves and how they want to be seen by what they show in these two places. A Web site, or a brochure should be no different, right?
Want an interesting place to explore this? Go to myspace and take a look at 20 year old's profiles. Both men and women spend alot of time "personalizing" their spaces, and the differences are sometimes so dramatic that you have to wonder. But it is important to notice the bigger trend, that both men and women spend times decorating...but each does so to extole their inner virtues, men showcasing their masculinity, and women showcasing their feminity. And that is just the "straight" profiles, get into LGBT spaces and all bets are off.