A collection of stuff

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.

clipped from www.andyrutledge.com Volume Doesn’t Matter May 6, 2007 Despite what you’ve read, the volume of text on your page in and of itself has no impact on the success of your site. Statisticians will tell you otherwise, because they observe specific behaviors and perceive patterns and think that their perceptions easily translate into concrete conclusions. They’re usually wrong on this score. The fact is it doesn’t matter what volume of copy you have if the copy is well designed.

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!

After being asleep for 5 hours or so I couldn’t sleep anymore and woke up at 4:00 AM. That’s a good time to review the good ol’ rss feeds and found that there had been a few very interesting, although not related, articles on web development, technique and the future of web design.

First, Steven Clark wrote an excellent article on The Three Pillars of Good Web Design, and I couldn’t agree more with what he has to say. A web site is not a poster, or a magazine, it has its own needs and uses and we can’t forget about it.

Second, Eric Meyer went and created what looks like very complicated css that surely implied many hours of testing at retesting but ultimately achieves a very straightforward, standards compliant and very cool Structured Timeline purely using html and css. I love it!!!

And, finally, on A List Apart, Aaron Gustafson reveals a complement that would take us Beyond the Doctype Switch to see if that will stop new browser releases from breaking the code of lazy ass developers who still use Frontpage 98 to make their sites. Personally, I couldn’t care less if some developer harebrainedly makes a site without consideration for standards or proper design and it then breaks on IE 8 or whatever comes later. That should teach them or their clients (you know who, the ones that insisted that it had to work ‘just so’ on IE5.5 and to hell with everything else). Still, we’ll have to see if there are any advantages in using a new switch or if it will add a new layer of complexity and uncertainty to the mix.

I’m still undecided but I think that harebrained designers will keep breaking the web. That’s right, it’s not new browser versions but bad web designers who break the web. There, I said it.