I’m kind of stuck with this new design for a site that I’ve been avoiding working on because I am stuck. But I really have to move forward with the project so first I must get over myself.
I want to give the site a fresh modern look yet I want it to be readable and most importantly:understandable. I also don’t want to shock anyone who was used to the old site’s layout, mainly the owner of the site.
So I went in search of inspiration and found this article
Something’s Missing in Webdesign
by Khoi Vinh.
I didn’t know it but Vinh is the design director of NYtimes.com(whoa).
I was more inspired by a comment left by Jeff Croft who talked about being annoyed by CSS “gurus” who wiffle endlessly
about technique and seem to skip over design. He feels they are not designers or that they spend way too much time talking about their techniques rather than discussing elements of their designs…but I don’t quite know how one can make a layout work (look good and function) without knowing some cold, hard css and html, or xhtml techniques!
Perhaps “semantic mark-up studs”, Mr.Crofts words, spend so much time talking about how to do things the right way rather than why they do things reflects more on the difficulty of getting one’s idea to translate successfully on a cross browser basis.
Now that browsers are getting better at serving up our original intentions (which is all just code, by the way) rather than throwing roadblocks in our paths-maybe soon we can talk only about the whys of our design and not the hows of it.
I began thinking of the chicken or the egg problem but in this case it isn’t that at all.You will not be a good designer unless you can code.
Web design is code. If it’s beautiful or astonishing and above all new,all the better.