A thousand years before anyone designed a navigation menu, people were already solving many of the same problems designers face today: What should someone notice first? How do separate pieces of information relate? What signals tell us where to go next?
In a new article for Entrepreneur, ArtVersion Principal and Creative Director Goran Paun looks beyond the relatively short history of the web to examine the much longer history of how people make information understandable.
The connection is surprisingly direct. Manuscripts established hierarchy through scale and form. Maps developed systems for orientation. Architecture used entrances, landmarks, pathways, and spatial relationships to help people understand where they were. Signs and publications developed conventions that allowed information to be scanned rather than deciphered from scratch.
Web design inherited much of that logic.
Designing for recognition, not explanation
Modern interfaces can do things their predecessors never could, but people still depend on recognizable signals to make sense of them.
Headings establish priority. Proximity creates relationships. Repetition builds familiarity. Navigation creates a mental map. Images can explain form, process, scale, or evidence before a paragraph ever does.
That distinction matters because digital design can easily become occupied with what can be produced rather than what needs to be understood.
A page can accommodate more content. A design system can generate more combinations. An AI tool can produce more layouts, imagery, copy, and interface variations. None of those capabilities determine whether the person on the other side of the screen knows where they are or what matters.
The work of design is still partly the work of creating order.
Where originality actually helps
The article also considers a tension familiar to almost every digital design team: the desire to create something distinctive without making ordinary interactions unnecessarily difficult.
People bring years of learned behavior to a website. They already have expectations around links, search, directories, navigation, buttons, logos, forms, and page structure. Breaking those conventions can sometimes create a memorable experience. At other times, it simply makes something familiar harder to use.
Distinctiveness does not require reinventing every interaction.
There is room for expression in typography, composition, imagery, motion, storytelling, voice, and visual character while leaving useful conventions intact. Knowing where to introduce surprise—and where recognition is more valuable—is part of the judgment behind good UX.
AI makes the distinction more important
That judgment becomes more consequential as digital production accelerates.
AI is making it possible to generate and modify interfaces at a scale that would have been impractical only a few years ago. Yet faster production does not alter the basic mechanics of comprehension. An automatically generated interface still needs hierarchy. Personalized information still needs context. A conversational experience still needs to communicate what the system can do and what happened after someone acted.
The technology may be new. The person trying to understand it is not.
That may be one of the more useful ideas to carry into the next generation of digital design: progress does not require abandoning what people already know. Often, the better use of new technology is to make complexity easier to understand.
Read full article, “Your Website Is Built on a 1,000-Year-Old Idea. Here’s Why It Matters More Than Ever,” on Entrepreneur.