© 2000 Beth Skwarecki
bethnewt at hotmail dot com
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Joe Klein lamented recently, in reference to the Zeldman/Slashdot interview, that these here young whipper-snappers are telling designers how to design; that they turn an art into a series of Do's and Don't's, mostly Don't's.
I'm not sure who first decided to refer to this stuff as "web design", but it was a bad idea. The art/science/craft of putting together a website is too important to be left to the graphic designers.
Zeldman's detractors on Slashdot were not criticizing his layout or his colors or his typefaces. They pointed out that he used fonts that were too small to be read by many users (question #2) and were not resizable (#9). They objected to his splash page (#1) and his overriding of status bar URLs with cheeky comments (#3). They weren't talking about design; they were talking about usability (we'll leave the issue of whether they were right for later).
Nublog has wisely observed that the quality (or at least the commercial success) of a website is dependent not solely on usability nor solely on design, but on a combination of several factors: more important than design is the ability to let users access the site (without their browsers crashing or being explicitly refused) and easily make their way towards what they want. It of course helps to have something they want.
There have always been web designers who deliberately ignore the fact that they're not working on paper. I'm thinking specifically of the ones who demand pixel-level control over placement (especially in the days before CSS-P) and who use graphics even for text so that everything will look just right (see the front page of Dreamless.org or the "theory" discussions on Design Is Kinky [The Theory pages have been revamped and now actually use text. If you're desperate for bad web design, though, look at Jeopardy. -- beth (july 5, 2000)]). These are the people who are not aware that others may have a different connection speed or monitor resolution. Nor the same hardware and software -- braille terminals and text-to-speech browsers really exist.
Jakob Nielsen may not be much of a designer, but I'd still rather take web design advice from him than from David Siegel, if you know what I mean. Visual design is important, but shouldn't be accompanied by a blatant disregard for usability, cross-platform compatibility, or bandwidth.