Zen And The Craft Of Web Design
See what I did there? A cheap reference to a cult classic, with a simple but obvious twist to draw your closer attention. Before getting started, if you haven’t already, you really should read zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance by Robery Pirsig. Its bloody good!
So what has zen got to do with web design, and more importantly, why should you care? Well, if you want to stand out as a creative and original force on the web, then this is important to you. So listen up!
This article actually has precious little to do with zen in its proper sense, but it does borrow liberally from the ideological elements, the state of mind it suggests and the sense of balance it carries. I could bang on and on for hours about balance in design at this point, and what techniques you can employ to make your designs jump off the page, and force feed the viewer with your shiny content. But I won’t, because there are many, many much better designers out there than me, and a whole wealth of resources and tutorials. This article is more about approach, priority and process.
How many times have you landed on a truly beautiful website, and been awed by its visual balance and grace, only to find it breaks the minute you enlarge the text, or use an unusual browser or page reader? If you’re anything like me, lots. Using linux opens your eyes to narrow or non existent browser support. Or, as is more often the case, find the spectacle before you dims very quickly into the background radiation of great designs on the web?
Why is this?
As far as I’m concerned it is entirely down to a lack of understanding about what the web is, and how to use it. And it’s not surprising really. There are many myths about the web which directly impact the value it has as an information portal, and a marketplace.
The problem occurs because the web is treated like a piece of paper, and one can be forgiven for doing so, as it’s easy as a designer to confuse the two, because they share many features. But they are very different indeed. The relationship that the web has with print media is already quite imbedded, because the people making the pages so often have migrated from the world of print, and have taken their principles with them. It is still a new medium let’s not forget.
Of course, I’m not calling into question the ethics of print design, rather pointing out that they so often don’t apply to the net. A website in its most basic sense is a program. Even a static HTML site is a program (just!). Failure to understand this can result in badly functioning web pages with no real handle on usability and data structure.
The thing about print design is that the page is absolute. Your only constraints are space, time and cost. The rest is totally under your control, and every person who sees that page, will have the same experience. Have you ever looked to see how many browsers exist for the net? Not to mention how many operating systems, screens, and user preferences come into play. Need I say more?
A computer screen is not a piece of paper. Someone, one day, is going to view your page using lynx. Get over it! The more absolute control you crave over layout, the more temperamental the performance of your page. The web is a breathing organism in comparison to the printed page. Openness to the organic development of the web is crucial to success in web design. (Note – by success, I mean a website that works well, looks good, is accessible and doesn’t break. I’m savvy enough to know that fancy graphics alone can create the other kind of success quite nicely, thank you. A shame, really.)
This is why I have called web design a craft. It is not art, although art is very often an important element in web design, but the whole process is so much more; a collection of usability, accessibility, relevance, visual appeal, and mechanical integrity.
A preconceived idea of the web, if it is too narrow, too personal, too fixed, can ultimately compromise your success. An open mind should attend each project at each moment in order to find the best implementation of a brief. So many designers simply rehash the latest trends (very well in many cases), but they fail to say anything interesting about themselves, and more importantly, about their clients.
Web design is a meeting of many different disciplines. Do not be disheartened if you are not a master of all of them. Copywriter, graphic artist, SEO expert, web programmer, usabililty & accessibility guru to mention a few. The best we can all do is to always have an eye on these requirements during each project, and farm out the bits you feel could be done better by a dedicated professional.
Here’s a funny thing: the internet is a text based medium.
Take a deep breath. Silence your internal critic. I shall now repeat: the internet is a TEXT BASED medium. Of course the key words here are ‘text’, and ‘based’. I’m not saying there’s no pictures, movies, music and other media on the web, just that it’s primarily a text based medium. So thinking about it in terms of pictures and layout (design) can lead you easily to poor decision making.
Why is your site? What is its purpose? If you can’t answer these questions, then maybe you shouldn’t have a site at all. The purpose of the site needs to dictate the function of the site, which is itself a key element of design don’t forget. It dictates the layout, which in turn dictates what the rest of us call the design. This final step is basically packaging.
So that’s the craft side pretty much tied up – hopefully complete with art for the final sheen, but where does the zen come in? This is the part that’s hard to quantify, but these following pointers can improve things drastically:
- Be yourself – humans are cunning creatures. If you are pretending, they will notice.
- Express your personality – it’s nothing to be ashamed of, we’ve all got one, and it’s what makes you worth listening to*.
- Never use the word ’solutions’ when referring to services. Please!
- Be natural – similar to being yourself, being natural has an element of spontoneity and even playfulness about it. Anything too rigidly planned or contained is prone to miss out on that accidental stroke of genius.
People will come to your site for quality content. If you don’t have it, it won’t matter one bit how fancy your ‘design’ is, nobody will stick around. Once you have content worth coming back for, make sure you don’t lose visitors through poor design. The site should be intuitive, friendly, robust, quick to load, and appropriately dressed.
Anyone who’s used OS X and windows XP/ Vista will get that this is an excellent illustration of my last point. Both machines will do what you want them to do, but OS X will do it more simply, with less effort, in a way that’s more fun, more gracefully, and with style. Nuff said.
*this does not apply to scientologists, sorry.
This Article was written by Anthony Lane from A Branch of Design and NotBanksy’s Blog
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