I'm in a meeting room on the ground floor of San Francisco's Armory Building, the headquarters of Kink.com. Porn director Maîtresse Madeline is at the head of the table, explaining to the design team her vision for Whipped Ass, the girl-on-girl femdom site that she's taking over. With a new director, the site needs not only a new look, but a whole new feel. She's animated and driven as she talks about what she wants the new site to be. Her excitement is contagious; you feel almost like you're watching some perverted little kid telling Santa what she wants for Christmas.
But while most of us are satisfied with telling Saint Nick that we want a pony or a puppy, she's much more specific. She knows what kind of pony she wants, right down to the shade of brown its coat should be on the flanks and how long or thick its tail should be. Madeline may have very well been a pain in the ass for Santa when she was growing up, but the team of five design experts around the table are not only delighted with how vivid and precise her ideas for the site are, but lean forward, hungry for more. Erik Gibb, Kink's Director of User Experience, stands at a white board, quickly making notes and asking for more detail. At the table sit John Sander, Kink's VP of Marketing; Art Director Chris Ward; Senior Graphic Designer Nader Safinya; and Graphic Designer Leland Carina. All of them listen intently through the process, taking notes and occasionally asking Madeline to expand on one idea or another.
As Madeline herself says, adding Whipped Ass to her résumé represents something of a change for her. Until recently, she was exclusively directing for Divine Bitches, Kink's site for women dominating men, and she's been doing shoots for Whipped Ass for about a month and a half. "I'm so used to beating up boys," she says. "It's been very different." The differences between the sites don't stop there, though. The membership on Divine Bitches loves opulent settings with complex interactions; what the members of Whipped Ass want is much more "meat and potatoes": "Two hot bitches," Madeline says. "One chick ties up the other hot bitch and flogs her, beats her ass. There's a gag in her mouth. Get yourself off, fuck her in all her holes, and call it a day."
Within ten minutes, it's obvious that Erik's title is more than bureaucratic jargon; users may only be able to see and hear the content on Whipped Ass, but over the next hour, they talk about the new site design in terms of all five senses—and more besides.
The first thing they look at, of course, is the logo, a jagged graphic that Madeline says reminds her of "some crazy metal band," or something from the World Wrestling Federation. It looks dated, she says. Graphic designer Leland Carina notes that it's also impractical in terms of legibility: "The 'Ass' is hard to read." Erik Gibb jokingly says that it evokes "Umlaut porn." And therein lies the problem—in the year 2010, do you really want to be watching porn that reminds you of Eddie Van Halen's hairdo circa 1985?
The solution for redesiging the logo isn't visual: it's touch. How would the new logo feel to touch? "It's not plush," she says. "It's cool, it's sexy, it's sleek, it's edgy, it's [like] cutting your finger on a sharp knife," she says.
What sound would the user associate with the site? The zing of a knife being drawn.
How would it taste? The site should evoke both the sweet and the savory: the innocent subs are as sweet as Georgia peaches, while the harsh cruelty of the dommes evokes the sharp, acid taste of biting into tin foil or touching your tongue to a battery. It will smell like dirt and sweaty hair.
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