Pictures!
After the morning sessions we had a very good lunch at Gibraltar’s Point Centre for the Arts, a walk on the beach and then back for the last of the updates, a bit of strategic thinking and a scavengers hunt!
Today is TRIEC away day at the Toronto Islands where we talked about the relationship of Maytree with TRIEC, future Maytree projects that involve TRIEC in some way and an update on the TRIEC programs. It was a bit sad for me because this is the last away day I enjoy with the TRIEC team before moving 100% to the Maytree site.
Andy Rutledge writes in his blog about how he feels that educational institutes are not doing a good job currently in forming good web designers in their graphic design programs. I think he is totally right, specially on his recommendations about how students can overcome this and the four fundamental areas where they should fill the gaps.
The Employable Web Designer should be required reading for anyone who is thinking about developing web sites professionally, whether they are graphic designers or not. However I would go as far as to say that much of the reason why graphic designers are not being well prepared as web designers is because both are different disciplines, just as graphic design is different from interior design or industrial design. Specially for those technological areas that Andy points to as omissions in the graphic designer curriculum, the ones about html, css, affordance, usability, etc. are what makes web design differ enough from graphic design to be considered as a discipline of its own and not a subset or specialization.
As technology develops and the variety of uses for a website becomes greater these differences will be more and more evident. RSS feeds, mobile devices, APIs, microformats, readers for the sight-impaired, etc. already demand a unique set of qualifications and knowledge from a web designer, in many ways different from the one required as a graphic designer.
Although the principles of graphic design apply to parts of a website (namely the interface) there are many other things to consider when creating a website that go beyond the interface and into concepts of information architecture, knowledge management, usability and others. The faster the web designer recognizes these fundamental differences, the more marketable she or he will become.
If you have complex information it’s important that you don’t over simplify it, instead arrange its design to help user navigate and absorb that information.
Like Andy Rutledge says, people will read through text when it’s presented in a way that makes finding the relevant information easy, the act of reading restful and, of course, that the text is relevant, engaging and clear. No one will read through boring and confusing pieces of text, long or short.
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We’ve finally unveiled the new Maytree website. Besides the friendly URL’s there is now a cleaner design and content that is better organized. We’ll be ironing the occasional wrinkle and adding new features in the next few days, so keep visiting.
I developed the Wordpress template from a design provided to us. Version 2.5 of Wordpress makes things much easier than I thought they would be and I was able to find some very cool plugins to do things such as the sitemap and navigation menus. It’s not perfect, I’ll try to improve it as I get the time, but the end result is pretty solid, good, semantic html markup and nice css (although that could use a clean-up as well.
By the way, you better like it!