Designing for Middle School

Visuals are key in designing for this demographic. But not just any visuals. They need to be loud, and moving, kinetic, colorful and exciting. These ain’t your grandfather’s design standards.

There’s an argument—not necessarily a good or valid one, but one I’ve heard defended—that design becomes less essential to communication as the audience older. Babies need messages entirely comprised of shape and color and vibrancy as content, while adults are drawn to messages with entirely textual content. That argument aside, the underlying strength for me therein is that it’s a given that strong design is important to essential for a younger audience. While you can make an argument for the power and efficiency of communicating content through text, it’s a given that if you can’t read the textual content, or are less receptive to it, and that therefore your first entrée into the content is through the visual. It’s through how the message is arranged before you. It’s about the design.

Design for middle schoolers is a key juncture in the paradigm between the need for an entirely visually communicative message like a picture book, and fully written content. Design is essential in understanding this audience, and I would argue that poorly designed messages, however appropriate in terms of written content, won’t get through the metaphorical front door if not presented in a strong design.

It’s important to maintain a focus on fun, and energy. The middle school aged generation, as has been the case for the several generations before, has been heavily influenced by bright television graphics, quickly-imparted messages, and a quick-in, quick-out storytelling of music videos, commercials, video games and cartoons. Some critics have claimed that this has led this generation to shorter attention spans, boredom and ADD. A converse argument to this could be that middle schoolers are developing a visual sense that lets them multi-process information in a way that generations before them couldn’t. To the preceeding generations, this might seem over-burdening o a too young mind, because such concepts would have been—or maybe even still are—too much for a more mature mind to easily wrap around.

This ties in to some degree to my previous post—parents and teachers, and older generations assuming a lower level of ability in a child’s mind than the child is actually able to achieve. Having too high expectations for children is seen as a major detriment to self esteem. But boredom ain’t such a feel-good element, either.

It’s an unfortunate but arguable trend that marketers seem to be the ones who are aware of harvesting the flexibility of the middle school and pre-teen mind, moreso than many teachers or parents. To see this in action, try having a child train an adult in the latest, high level of a PS3 game, and watch who gets bored or frustrated first.

But I digress. The design point of this post is that the key functionality of design for middle schoolers is vibrancy, energy, and movement. It’s not the clean line aesthetic of Frank Lloyd Wright, but the colorful chaos of Chucky Cheeze.

But that’s not to say that visual chaos can stay chaotic. There must be an underlying organization to the kinetic energy playing across the visual framework. It’s the idea of the “crying baby” again. You need the crying baby to get the attention of this audience, but once that attention is drawn away from the other crying babies on the shelf or on the rack, there must be clear organization to bring understanding to the message, and keep the kids interest. Or he or she will move on to the next crying baby that does allow entry. The brightest, liveliest visual must also be absolutely clear and directive, to hold the interest it draws. If they have to work too hard for it, they will move on.