Metaphoric Design: A Novel Concept

”Design by Metaphor” or “Metaphoric Design” has become the buzzword in the arena of Website Design. This concept has attained enormous popularity among the designers and the website owners as it can translate the requirements of a client efficaciously. This concept “Metaphoric Design” has come into existence when both the clients and the designers were facing tremendous amount of difficulty while building an effective communication.

Metaphor, in rhetorical term, is used to point out similarities between two unallied things or ideas. Therefore, metaphor helps to summarize different concepts into one and thereby making it easier for a person to find out the not only similarities but also dissimilates between two different concepts. This concept is now used extensively in the domain of web designing industry as it helps to dissipate the doubts of a web designer about the exact retirement of a client. For example, if a client wants to design a website by referring another website like www.xyz.com, it will certainly facilitate the task of a web design as he can get a clear picture of what kind of webpage he has to design for that client and thereby preventing the wastage of working hours. This concept is popularly known as Metaphoric Design or “Design by Metaphor”.

The benefits of Metaphoric Design are enumerated below:

• It helps to bridge the gap between a client and web designer.
• It saves working hours and thereby reducing production cost.
• It also helps designers to meet deadline with élan and ease.
• It dissipates ambiguity, which might exist in designing concept.

Sometimes web designers also take recourse to this concept of “Metaphoric Design” before adding slight changes in a website. For example, a designer can refer a website to a client for explaining his/her designing decision.

Metaphoric Design is also helping online shoppers and visitors to obtain the desired information quickly. The website design concept of a large section of e-commerce websites is more and less the same. This is because the visitors of these websites like to get information about a particular product as quickly as possible. They concentrate more on easy accessibility of information than anything else does. Online Forum is another example of the successful implementation of the concept of “Metaphoric Design”.