Just because you can build a database and a bunch of controls and page-views does not automatically mean you know how to build a web site. A web developer knows how to make a web site feel right and interact well with their customers. A web developer can impart judgement and intuition into every decision s/he makes during the building of a web site.
Should design, programming, usability, and architecture remain exclusive? No.
A designer should know the limitations of HTML and CSS, a web programmer should know basic usability practices and design aesthetics, an architect should understand the customers needs and the client’s goals, and a usability expert should know a thing or two about beautiful design. And everyone should know how to write for the web!
There is a huge difference between programming for a web site and building a web site.
Reminds me when people first starting designing webpages and everyone had to have a funky tiled background and the same animated .gif of a guy digging with a shovel. No the irony isn’t lost on me that the Artemisphere has a reflection currently.
It seems a lot of web designers these day are trend following. The great glossy logo with the the reflective drop shadow, the saturated colors, the large beveled button, the ever omnipresent drop shadows and the same overused content layout patterns that mimic most blogs out there. It’s all fine and well but I think a lot of new media designers never even laid out a brochure or flowed text into a magazine article. How often did they experiment with type as they’ve been confined in a browser that wants system fonts for the default of the body copy.
With traditional print your open to a totally new set of creative possibilities and new types of boundaries so It’s unfortunate they miss some of these great learning experiences about content layout and page flow that could help them increase their web design skills. Really isn’t that the purpose of web? Content presentation and providing information? So when designers get so focused in on making big flashy graphics and ignoring text and how it reads within the page, they’re doing their readers and themselves a disservice. Magazine layouts and brochures are a great resources to get inspiration for line height and weight and unique layouts within an organizational grid. They show us from decades of the industries’ evolution how to effectively make copy readable and impactful. Ever create a 3 column text layout with a quote callout within the body copy? It’s done in magazines all the time but you don’t see it too often in a webpage. Most of the time a webpage’s subpage copy is just a pasting of a word document with some paragraph breaks thrown in. With the power of CSS we are given much more control of the type than we used to and we need to take advantage of it.
We as web designers need to take special attention and care to the text and how we present content and help engage the reader. Save that beveled gradient button for another day. Check out some of these great examples of content presentation in some brochure samples over at Smashing Magazine.
Not just any designer, but a designer who will kick their ass. I’m curious to see where this will go. I’d like to see what people submit, but I doubt they can just publicly display peoples’ intellectual property. Maybe some people will volunteer it, who knows?
If I was going to design their web site, I wonder what I would do? I wonder what anyone on our team at Artemis would do? Maybe for fun, I’ll post something here later.
I’m going to keep checking in on 37S and watch where this goes.
Oh, and this makes me want to post a reference to a quote by Zeldman: “Content precedes design. Design in the absence of content is not design, it’s decoration.”
It’s like staring at Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto, but in real life. A tribe of Indians in the Amazon Basin were photographed from the air last week, and they’ve never had contact with “civilized life”.
