Russian Ball in London
The Russian Ball held to mark the 400th anniversary of the Romanov dynasty went completely unnoticed. Few people saw the design of its coat of arms and website, and those who did understood almost nothing. They saw a sloppy piece of work in the spirit of the 1990s, although it was nothing of the kind: an enormous amount of work and knowledge went into the design.
Recently, a friend sent me a headline set in an italic serif typeface and asked why a design studio was using lettering from a market stall. Do you know what typeface it was? Garamond, one of the oldest serif typefaces, dating back to 1530.
That’s when it all clicked. It turns out technology has spoiled our taste. We have forgotten how to appreciate serifs unless they are on a book spine. When did you last see an on-screen headline in a serif typeface? Everything is set in ultra-bold Helvetica now, or whatever the iPhone uses these days, San Francisco?
The trend goes back to the first computer screens, which had very large pixels. Elegant serifs couldn’t be rendered nicely on them, so everyone switched en masse to sans serif typefaces. They are made of straight strokes and are easy to draw on screen. For serif typefaces, anti-aliasing algorithms were invented: the pixels along the edges of letters are made semi-transparent to create a smooth look.
That is how we lost serif typefaces. Today any headline set in a noble 16th-century roman looks like a sign on a photocopy kiosk. Partly because of anti-aliasing, and partly because Times New Roman is still the most popular typeface for notices typed in Word. And yet Garamond, the king of serif typefaces, was once used by Apple in its advertising, its logo and on the Macintosh itself:
The Russian Ball was last held in 1913, the year of the Romanov dynasty’s 300th anniversary. It would be odd to use Helvetica for the site, wouldn’t it? So I chose the Petersburg typeface, also known as Kudryashev Encyclopedic, a long and complicated name, a bit like the names of Moscow metro lines.
Petersburg is not a pre-revolutionary typeface but a Soviet one. I tried pre-revolutionary typefaces when I was sketching drafts of the site:
It looked overloaded. Yes, Clarendon, Kuzanyan and Novaya Standartnaya capture the spirit of the era better. You can even set a headline in them, but they are completely unsuitable for body text: it would be impossible to read. So for a long time we couldn’t decide on the style of the site.
Then Ilya Glazunov joined the project and drew something thoroughly Old Russian, which confused everyone even more:
When it became clear that our experiments with old typefaces had carried us away, we settled on Petersburg. It was a great compromise: the typeface looks quite old, and an untrained eye won’t tell it apart from a pre-revolutionary one (or from Times, for that matter), yet it works for both body text and headlines. I later satisfied my urge to do something pre-revolutionary with a poster advertising a manager vacancy at the studio. That one is pure pre-revolutionary Russian style: two dozen typefaces and absurd dialogues.
Coat of arms as a logo
The logo was designed by the magnificent Mitya Paramonov. First, he suggested drawing the Albert Hall, the royal concert hall in London where the Russian Ball was to take place.
The drafts were interesting, but the logo had nothing to do with the ball or with anything Russian. It looked like either the Albert Hall’s own logo or the branding of a London travel agency.
Then Mitya went all in and took on heraldry. “I’ll try to combine a coat of arms with music,” he said. “Strauss waltzes are played at balls, and his silhouette is already used in the client’s other logos, like the one for the Vienna Ball in Moscow. But instead of Strauss himself, we’ll take his violin.”
The idea was great, but we had never faced a task like this. We had to draw something that was a coat of arms and yet more of a logo. Follow the basic laws of heraldry but break those that conflict with the laws of logo design. Find the right style of strokes and lines. Make a color version. And, on top of all that, merge the shape of the heraldic shield with a violin!
The next day, Mitya sent the first sketch of his idea.
I wouldn’t say I liked it. I simply didn’t understand it. Fortunately, Mitya is very persuasive. A few days later, he sent a new draft with a more detailed coat of arms. This time it was drawn on tracing paper, scanned and vectorized in Adobe Illustrator.
Let me explain a little of what is going on here.
Coats of arms come in lesser, middle and greater versions. You have most likely seen lesser ones: usually just a shield with an animal or ornament on it. If you take that shield, add knights around it, top it with a cap, helmet or crown, or place it on a double-headed eagle, you get the middle coat of arms. If you then put the middle coat of arms inside a royal mantle and surround it with ornaments and many other elements I don’t even know the names of, you get the greater coat of arms.
All three are the country’s coat of arms at the same time, and which one to use depends on the occasion. Here are the lesser, middle and greater coats of arms of Poland from 1815 to 1832.
To show the main details of the coat of arms, I’d rather take the coat of arms of the United Kingdom.
The lion and the unicorn are called supporters. The tradition comes from medieval tournaments, where several people carried a real, heavy shield behind a knight. Mythical animals replaced the people, symbolizing the spiritual forces that protect the owner of the arms.
The knight’s helmet, which here looks like a stove grate, sits on top of the shield and represents the owner of the arms. The helmet is gold, which in British tradition signifies the royal family.
The gold and silver patterns flowing out from behind the supporters, resembling waves or leaves, are the mantling. It serves as ornament.
And inside the circle with the inscription is the shield, the very part that is loosely called the coat of arms, although it is only one element of it.
Now back to Mitya’s draft. In the center is a shield shaped like a violin. Note the two integral-shaped openings on the sides: on a violin, they are called f-holes. The Albert Hall serves as the helmet, and the burdock around the shield is not burdock at all but mantling in the form of leaves.
The shield also bears the words “Russian Ball in London.” Coats of arms usually carry a motto rather than a name, but here that subtlety didn’t matter. The letters R and B were illegible in the draft, but we will come back to them later.
We showed the draft to the organizers. Elisabeth, an Austrian, was the most excited and even ran off to fetch someone: “Look, look, he combined the coat of arms with a violin!”
Everyone loved the idea, but no self-respecting client ever accepts work without comments, and this time was no exception. After examining the coat of arms from every angle, the organizers decided it was missing… dancing people. And that is an absolute taboo: heraldry strictly forbids people inside the shield! People can only be supporters.
Never, under any circumstances, can they be inside. Unless it is St. George, and he didn’t waltz, he slew venomous serpents. Our only hope was to draw the people so badly that the client would dislike it and drop the idea.
We found a dancing couple, and Mitya drew them.
We put them inside the shield. Nauseating. Exactly what we needed.
We showed it to the client and explained that we could draw it better, but that this is not how coats of arms are treated. To our great relief, Elisabeth wrinkled her nose and said: “You’ve convinced us, no people. But letters are allowed? All right, let’s have letters.”
Letters are allowed on shields, although long text is not customary. Coats of arms usually carried a motto. For example, the Polish coat of arms above bears the inscription “God is with us”; that is its motto. Or take Harvard’s famous coat of arms: it shows three open books with the word VERITAS, Latin for “truth,” and below the shield is a ceremonial ribbon reading “Harvard.”
For the Russian Ball’s coat of arms, we took the initials R and B. Here we had to break with our consistent Russophilia and use Latin letters.
There were several reasons. First, coats of arms are a product of Western culture; there are very few good examples in Russia, and none involving typography. Second, Russian has very few examples of ligatures (two joined letters), even outside heraldry. Third, since the project was international, we would have had to make two versions of the coat of arms, which would be odd. I’ve never heard of anyone localizing a coat of arms.
We also decided to drop the Albert Hall. It looked too much like an Uzbek skullcap. And in heraldic terms, it made the Albert Hall look like the owner of the Russian Ball.
The draft came together quite quickly, but then the work dragged on for three months. We had to take a huge number of details into account and think in many dimensions at once.
We worked on the ligature. The R was legible from the start, if barely, but the B came out completely illegible. The hardest part was the joint between the letters. We needed to take the right leg of the R and connect it very elegantly to the B, but how? The B is a closed letter.
We tried opening the lower bowl of the B and echoing it with the leg of the R. That turned the B into an e, and it became completely illegible.
We looked for another way to connect the letters. We made the B a capital, gave it a dashing swash at the top and wrapped it around the bowl of the R. We did the same with the bottom stroke.
Look what happened: before, the lower bowl of the B opened at the top, and now the gap is at the bottom. It finally looks like a B, but the result is such a tangle of squiggles that the Dynamo logo started showing through. You’ll spot it if you stare long enough at the lower left part of the drawing.
A calligrapher we knew gave us some advice. We replaced the top of the R to match the B and cleaned up the mess in the right corner.
In the final step, we joined the R and B — there it is, elegance! We found it!
Alongside the calligraphy, we worked on the style of engraved hatching.
A coat of arms is not a logo, not a drawing and not graphics at all. It is actually a coded phrase written in a special heraldic language, the blazon. Take the coat of arms of the Swedish province of Värmland. It looks like this: “Argent, an eagle azure, armed and langued gules.” I did mean “looks.” This phrase is the coat of arms, and how it is drawn is secondary. The eagle can be drawn in a hundred different ways, and the red of its beak can have a thousand shades, but any combination is still the same coat of arms.
We could have chosen any rendering for the coat of arms, but we settled on an engraving technique. I think we were very taken with the logos Lebedev had drawn for the Grand Imperial restaurant and the Bolshoi Theater, and we wanted to do something similar.
The letters could be hatched in two ways: along or across the main strokes. Cross hatching looked too much like banknote engraving, so we went with lengthwise strokes that resembled melon seeds.
When we put the new letterforms into the shield, we realized they could no longer fill it evenly. There was an empty space at the top that begged to be filled: heraldry does not welcome emptiness. At the same time, we had overdone the mantling. The result looked less like a coat of arms than a violin wrapped in a head of cabbage.
We drew new mantling, but the space at the top of the shield is called the honor point, and it had to be filled with something… honorable. Heralds often put other, nested coats of arms there. So we came back to where we started: London. A commemorative one-pound coin featured a beautiful coat of arms of the City of London in just the right style. Mitya redrew it and placed it in the honor point. Now, if the next Russian Ball takes place in, say, Berlin, the city arms can simply be swapped.
We put it all together. The result was a magnificent coat of arms in which every detail has meaning.
We showed it to the organizers, and there wasn’t a single comment. That happens when a project is so complex that there is no point even explaining it. Not a single detail of the coat of arms can be changed without bringing down the whole structure.
The only thing the client asked for was a color version. That was no problem. The Russian Empire had a beautiful identity in its black and yellow flag. We couldn’t fill the coat of arms with black, so we made it dark brown and turned the yellow into gold over a canvas paper texture. Such a liberty is not only acceptable but desirable. The mantling leaves naturally became green, and the St. George’s cross in the London arms became red, as in the original.
By creating a color version, however, we broke one important rule of heraldry. In black and white, every color must be conveyed with hatching, a conventional system in which each color is represented by its own pattern of black lines.
So by the rules, we should have redone the black-and-white version, removing all the engraving and hatching it again according to the colors.
Of course, we didn’t :-) But we did prepare a simplified version of the coat of arms for small print formats.
Drop cap
In old books, the first letter of each chapter was traditionally decorated with ornament. This is called a drop cap, or an initial. Today drop caps are hardly ever used, but you can still find them in children’s fairy tale books.
But this is a very bad example. Drop caps suffered the same fate as serif typefaces. Printing technology made books a mass product, leaving no time for decoration. Whoever takes on drawing drop caps today hardly understands what they are dealing with. That is why the result looks like a flea market, even though the drop cap is an extremely powerful device. On this page from the Bible, the initial L takes up the entire page; you might not even notice it at first:
That would be too much for a website, but I still wanted a drop cap. So I asked myself: what kinds are there? It turned out there are many.
You could collect thousands of such images and look at them for hours, but design is not really about beauty; it is first and foremost about solving a problem. And the problem was to make a usable website in a Russian style without sliding into mere decoration.
We found a clean typographic technique without ornament: the lines of text follow the contour of a large letter. It looks stylish.
One problem remained: a website is not a printed book; everything on it changes all the time. What happens when an editor wants to replace the text? We couldn’t write an algorithm that would wrap text around a letter automatically. So we agreed with the front-end developer to define line offsets by hand for every letter of both alphabets, Russian and English. Some letters are shared, so it came to just over 40 variants.
This diagram is from another project where we made the same kind of drop cap; the one for the Russian Ball has not survived. The idea is the same. The number under the letter is the minimum line offset relative to the letter, and the numbers to the right are the additional offsets for each line.
Take the letter A. Below it is the number 140. To its right is a row of numbers: 0, 15, 30, 45, 64. This means the first line of text is offset by 140 + 0 pixels, the second by 140 + 15, and so on.
The drop cap was used in only one section of the site, the most important one, which told the story of the ball. In fact, the whole site was like that: dozens of complex techniques, each used only once. It was as if we were squandering the resources the client had given us.
A whole section for one letter
Design is war.
Maybe not a war, but I did wage a small battle with the organizer of the Russian Ball. Alexander Smagin asked me to capitalize the word “ball” (бал) to emphasize the importance of the event. This offended my sense of beauty so much that I protested:
“Alexander, in Russian the word ‘ball’ is written in lowercase, it’s part of a name. Like ‘Moscow State University,’ which in Russian is written with lowercase letters too.”
“I understand, but I still ask you to capitalize it. Our company is called Vienna Ball Moscow LLC, all in capitals. It’s part of our corporate culture.”
“Then do it yourself. Open the code and change it to a capital.”
Everyone in the office was so stunned by this audacity that something fell off their faces: someone’s cracked pince-nez dropped from their eye, someone’s pre-revolutionary mustache came unstuck and floated to the floor.
“But… what do you mean? Why?”
“Because the esteemed design community will eat me alive if I write the name of the Russian Ball honoring the 400th anniversary of the Romanov dynasty with a spelling mistake.”
At that point my business angel stepped in and saved us all from a fistfight, because I was already boiling. In private, he asked me to capitalize the word. Of course, I silently sent the layouts with a lowercase letter. The row flared up again, and arguments like this were used: you can capitalize every word in headlines, look at Apple. “No,” I replied, “that rule exists in English, but not in Russian.”
They even brought in some editors or journalists who tried to prove me wrong by waving around Rosenthal’s style guide, which they hadn’t even read. Then they threatened to terminate the contract.
I didn’t care. I saw this project as one of the most important of my life, and I could not put a mistake on the home page. How could I live with that? What would I say when I stood before God?
The conflict reached a deadlock, and it was clear that heavy artillery was needed. I gathered several reference books: Rosenthal, Milchin and Yakov Grot, a 19th-century Russian philologist and academician. I took from them every rule concerning the names of balls and imperial dynasties. Then I designed a Press section with the ball’s logos and photos and added a Spelling tab where I laid out everything I had found.
A whole section for one letter! The battle was won, the client capitulated, and the design community didn’t notice the project.
A period at the end of headings.
On projects like this, you have to pay close attention to the details. Not in the sense that everything must be flawless; mistakes are fine. What matters is to add as many references, hidden meanings and Easter eggs as possible.
So we already had a gorgeous drop cap and had found a yat for Dulcinea. What else? If you look closely at pre-revolutionary posters, you’ll see that headlines always used to end with a period.
This practice actually went out of fashion not so long ago: even ads for the first Macintosh computers have periods.
Yes, people used to take grammar more seriously. A headline is a sentence, after all, so it needs a period. Today designers are shy even about commas: it’s ugly, they say, people will stop buying. Well, the Russian Ball website will have periods, and if you don’t like it, you can return your tickets.
The missing yat for Dulcinea
While going through copies of pre-revolutionary books, I came across an interesting script used for illustration captions and headings.
It is a handwritten script, written with a quill. Look at these elongated letters with continuous joins: this is model 19th-century calligraphy. Official letters were written in this hand, but it was rarely used in print, and only for short inscriptions, because it was hard to read.
I immediately wanted to use it on the site. It reminded me of something I had seen before. I opened Lebedev’s website, and sure enough: this is where his Dulcinea typeface came from. I bought a license right away and tried it. It fit perfectly, but it turned out the font had no yat.
Yat and yer are often confused. The hard sign at the end of words is yer. Yat looks more like a soft sign with a crossed stem.
That crossbar has something Orthodox about it; it looks a lot like a church cross. Indeed, all these yers, yats and izhitsas survived in church texts long after they were dropped from the Russian alphabet. Even the mnemonic verse for memorizing words with yat begins like this: “Замѣшу посѣвъ въ мѣрило, Ѣду грѣхъ исповѣдать.”
A Russian reader can easily read these lines by replacing yat with е. That is exactly why yat was removed from the Russian alphabet: its pronunciation had merged with е even before Pushkin’s time, and it became “a mark distinguishing the literate from the illiterate.”
So I had to find the missing yat for Dulcinea to avoid making an illiterate website for the royal family. I didn’t know how to design type back then. I figured that since Lebedev had digitized a pre-revolutionary script, there must be at least a draft of the yat. I wrote to the studio and got no reply. A week later, I wrote to Lebedev personally and explained that I was on a matter of national importance. And then one morning I got an email with a special version of Dulcinea, with a yat! I literally jumped out of my chair with joy. Thank you, Tyoma.
Pre-revolutionary UI Kit
Paintings and typefaces on a website stay the same as they were on paper a hundred years ago. Only the way they are “printed” changes: instead of watercolor and ink, there is a glowing electronic screen.
The same can’t be said of interface elements. Buttons, dropdown menus, text fields: none of these existed before the computer, although many controls had real-world prototypes. A text field, for example, comes from a paper form, and the radio button is even named after the buttons on old radios that were used to switch stations.
Carrying real-world objects over to the computer screen is called skeuomorphism. Many designers mistakenly believe skeuomorphism is an interface style with shadows, gradients and textures. In a narrow sense, that is true, but in fact skeuomorphism is any imitation of one thing by another.
The shadow under an icon on the screen doesn’t exist: it imitates a real shadow. The phone handset icon imitates a real handset. Serifs in a digital typeface merely imitate the serifs on Trajan’s Column. Candle-shaped light bulbs imitate real candles in a candlestick. The folding top of a modern convertible imitates the folding tops of old horse-drawn carriages. These are all examples of skeuomorphism.
So we needed to come up with good skeuomorphs for the Russian Ball’s interface elements.
Website design often starts with the main menu. There aren’t many options: at the top, on the side, or behind a hamburger icon. Side menus are used mainly in online stores, which have lots of items. A hamburger menu, hidden behind a three-line icon, is too much of a media-site device and is hard to use on corporate websites. So the Russian Ball’s main menu went at the top.
The main menu comes with the logo, which can go either on the left or in the center. This key decision sets the composition of the whole site: will it be left-aligned or centered? I already know the answer, but let’s look at how things were done before the revolution.
Naturally, it is the simplest option: a centered composition anchored by a symmetrical coat of arms. The Russian Ball’s logo is a coat of arms too. Now let’s look for something resembling a menu. Here is how inscriptions next to coats of arms were done: as ceremonial ribbons.
Pre-revolutionary advertising is an art form of its own. Before color printing, ads were drawn in an engraving style, and posters were filled with intricate pictures and patterns.
I borrowed the ribbons and the engraving style from these old ads, and Mitya Paramonov drew a specially shaped ribbon and adapted it for the main menu.
We spent a long time choosing the style of arrows and flourishes to decorate the headings, going through an old catalog of printer’s ornaments.
Mitya drew all the elements in the engraving style. The arrows came out like spearheads, and the flourishes kept their familiar shape.
The text fields were the hardest; the shapes of the button and the audio slider came naturally.
How do you like it? Have you ever seen a pre-revolutionary UI kit?
The Romanovs and the Albert Hall
We decided to add a page with a short history of the Romanov dynasty. The organizer wrote the text, and we had to come up with the design. I wanted to find original portraits of the tsars rather than ones from history textbooks. We found several pre-revolutionary albums with portraits of almost every member of the imperial family.
The page turned into a long scroll. That is good: an article, book-like format.
The ruling Romanovs, as is well known, were shot by the Bolsheviks, but other members of the family still live in London, the very city where the Russian Ball was to be held.
The ball was held at the Royal Albert Hall, a hugely prestigious concert venue known all over the world. A kind of Bolshoi Theater, only for music. Richard Wagner himself once performed there, Albert Einstein gave a lecture, and Led Zeppelin played a farewell concert. “Now they know how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall,” sang the Beatles, poking fun at the posh backsides that like to fill its seats.
For the Albert Hall, we found an old painting with horse-drawn carriages driving around the building.
We used this painting as the background for a short page about the Albert Hall. Few people in Russia had heard of it, so we needed to explain where the ball was taking place.
Mihály Zichy
The Russian Ball was being held for the first time in 100 years, so the organizer sent photos of another event, the Vienna Ball in Moscow. We looked at them and tried them on the site. Not right.
So we went looking for photos of Russian balls. Was there color photography back then? Of course there was: Prokudin-Gorsky was shooting in color as early as 1903. Maybe he photographed a ball? No, we couldn’t find a single photo of a Russian ball.
I asked Mitya Paramonov: “My lord court herald, do you know of any court painter who painted balls?” “Certainly, sir: Mihály Zichy.”
Zichy was a painter of Hungarian origin who chronicled events at the court of Alexander II. He was called not a painter but a draftsman, which was a great honor. And Zichy painted a large series of pictures, from the tsar’s coronation to all sorts of balls.
We tried his paintings, and this was exactly what we needed!
We showed it to the organizer, and he said: “Yes, Zichy was a wonderful artist, and his painting fits perfectly. But please add a photo as well; the painting doesn’t capture the essence.” So what now, split the screen in half? Ugly.
This is a typical problem, by the way. The client likes his original idea; you show him a better one, and instead of replacing the first, he asks you to do both. When that happens, first look for other problems nearby. This layout clearly had one: the title was small and didn’t match the grand painting at all. Perfect, we can solve both problems at once.
One of the most effective techniques in design: take a problem, blow it up even further, push it to the point of absurdity and pretend that is how it was meant to be. The title doesn’t fit? Great, let it run off the screen. Let’s make it two screens wide and add a parallax effect, where the background moves more slowly than the foreground.
Storyboard:
Now we need a way to show the photo. We extend the slideshow with two more slides of the same kind, only with the photo. Clicking the arrow on the second slide repeats the title effect, this time over a modern photo.
The result is a “before and after” effect: the painting shows a ball 100 years ago, and the photo shows today’s ball. A kind of time portal.
Here is a storyboard of all four slides:
Video of the effect:
It turned out really cool. The words “Russian Ball” over a real Russian ball at the imperial court, and the second part, “in London,” over a modern photo. The photo isn’t from London, of course, but who would know?
Thank you, Zichy! We’ll give you your own section on the site. His other paintings went into the remaining sections. They suited the Russian Ball so well that it felt as if Zichy, like Misha Lenn, had painted them specially for the site.
A gala performance at the Bolshoi Theater on the occasion of Alexander II’s coronation. The painting was perfect for the Tickets page.
Wilhelm I and Alexander II at breakfast. A conversation between two emperors is a great metaphor for the Contacts section.
Misha Lenn and his paintings
Besides Ilya Glazunov, the watercolor artist Misha Lenn was brought into the project.
I know nothing about fine art and had never heard of Lenn before. I read up on him. It turned out his paintings are in the collections of Gorbachev and Malkovich, and he had even received an “Oscar” as America’s best watercolorist. He had painted a picture for the Russian Ball, and it was sent to me to put on the home page.
But how was I supposed to do that? This is a website, not an exhibition. A website needs a logo, a menu, text and buttons. All of it has to be readable, and nothing is readable on such a busy painting. Of course, we could do this:
but what for? It would ruin both the painting and the text. Once again I had to dig in my heels and politely explain why the painting wouldn’t work on the site and that we already had a good style built on Zichy’s paintings:
“But Misha must be somewhere on the site!”
“And he will be!”
I made a separate page for Misha with a short bio and examples of his paintings. That’s better than an uncaptioned painting on the home page, isn’t it?
And once we had made such a page for one person, we had to make them for everyone. That is how a whole series of pages appeared on the site: about the project’s sponsor Natalya Kaspersky, the court painter Mihály Zichy and the watercolorist Misha Lenn.
Everyone liked this solution, and later, at the ball in London, I happened to run into Misha in person:
“So you’re the website designer? What happened with my painting?”
“Well, you see, it didn’t fit. So I had a separate section made about you.”
“Damn it, I like you.”
It was a delicate moment.
The dinner menu and the program
The two most delicious pages of the site are the dinner menu and the ball program. The archives had plenty of old theater and restaurant bills.
The Russian Ball program page was modeled on old playbills and schedules. There isn’t a single image on it; it is pure typography. And it looks great!
This approach didn’t work for the menu page, which had to show photos of the dishes. For the Russian Ball, the dishes were prepared from recipes used at the court of Nicholas II, such as pheasant with apples. I believe the kitchen was run by the famous showman and pastry chef Renat Agzamov, so the food was truly fit for a tsar.
The photos, however, seem to have been taken on a phone, so I’ll show only the top of the dinner page. The lower part, with the photos, is not very appetizing.
A secret basement with hidden sections
When putting the site together, we faced a question: where should all these pages go? There were clearly more of them than the menu could hold.
Conventional wisdom says that website navigation should be clear and obvious to every visitor. Generally, yes, but not always. Let’s put it this way: if the ticket page is hard to find, that is very bad. But if what is hidden are secondary pages rather than important ones, that is actually good: a first-time visitor doesn’t need them, and someone who visits the site many times will find them sooner or later.
A friend of mine even suggested that finding a hidden section creates an emotional bond between the user and the site. The user feels let in on a secret as a reward for liking the site and spending enough time on it to find the hidden sections.
I applied this philosophy to the Russian Ball site by putting all the secondary pages in the footer, the “basement.” There is no other way to reach them.
Since then, I have used this concept in all my own projects, where there is no client pushing his wish list on me.
What happened next
The Russian Ball took place at the Royal Albert Hall in London on December 2, 2013. It was attended by members of the Romanov family, famous composers and musicians, and the ambassadors of Russia and the United Kingdom. One hundred and twenty debutantes and their partners took part in the dance program.
The press was lukewarm. I think Afisha magazine wrote that the ball felt like a high school prom: the guests got drunk and climbed onto the dance floor to do Russian folk dances. Well, yes. That’s roughly how it was.
After that, five balls were held every year until relations between Russia and the West finally broke down.
The site took about six months to build in early 2013. The budget was 25,000 dollars, an unthinkable sum at the time, all of which went to salaries with no profit margin (with a margin, the project would have cost about 65,000 dollars).
The site lasted until the end of 2014, when the ball’s organizer and its investor fell out over copyright and the site was redesigned. The new version, probably made by a far more professional designer than me, took all of the client’s wishes into account. The word “ball” was capitalized, the secret sections and drop caps were removed, and Misha Lenn’s painting finally made it onto the home page.
Beautiful! Everything by the guidelines, everything per the spec, with no quarrels, no wars over letters, no endless arguments and no strange decisions. The client must have been very pleased to find such a good, obedient designer.
Design is war. And another battle of that war was lost.