Philippe Starck: Putting design first

Initial designer-led excess leads to an appropriate and polished use of a visuals-driven navigation system.

The Site

Philippe Starck is among the best-known interior and product designers of the past 25 years. His company’s website is an online portfolio of work in areas from ‘architecture and interiors’ to ‘luggage’ and ‘urban furniture’. To uncover the corresponding sections of the site visitors must first click on the word ‘menu’, which then activates a stylised universal left-hand menu bar.

Within sections the content menus are image- not text-based; they appear as a panel of year-labelled product-shots on the right of the page. Similarly styled sub-menus take their place on further clicking. These have their own up/down navigation arrows for viewing the full list. When an image is chosen an enlargement is presented in the central panel, where mousing over the image reveals a short caption. Further sections can be accessed at any time from the universal menu.

The Takeaway

At first sight, Philippe Starck’s web presence is an annoying cliché of designer-led excess: a triumph of form over function. For example, visitors are made to click on the word ‘menu’ to see one, when they might assume from the otherwise blank screen that there is a problem with the page loading. The forced ‘justification’ and even spacing of headings in the menu bar also works against readability.

But if you get used to this, then the site works well in displaying the portfolio of work that is its prime purpose. Starck’s status is such that while this is in essence his catalogue, he can treat it as a showcase rather than a direct marketing or sales tool. So, the use of text can be marginalised to play up the product images and journeys kept simple. This is carried through to the use of icons for navigation within sections, which is underpinned by effective archiving and use of menu bars to turn browsing into a smooth experience.

The result reinforces the sense of style and practicality in Starck’s work. Even so, he is one of the few people who could justify an all-Flash website and hope to pull it off to such effect.

First published on 22 March, 2005