Aarron Walter

I’m usually averse to blogging about things that are already hot topics of everyone else’s blog, but I think all of my students who read this blog should take a look at this recent post on Ajaxian. A web designer took a screen shot after adding content to a page or modifying the CSS, revealing and interesting look at the evolution of the web page development process. The screen shots are rolled into an animated Gif to show the design through time.

Cameron Moll gave a great presentation to the Webmaster Jam Session in September in Dallas, Texas entitled Nine Skills That Separate Good and Great Designers. His presentation is filled with great observations about how to think of design as problem solving rather than making attractive things, and is great for budding web desginers. His examples illustrating each of his points find connections both within and outside of the web world, but always creatively support his key ideas. A podcast and PDF of his presentation are available for download. I advise following along in the presentation as you listen to the podcast as the images are important to the talk.

The Webmaster Jam Session conference had a number of speakers worth listening to including Andy Budd, and Eric Meyer. Podcasts of all talks can be downloaded, but the production quality is spotty on some.

Communication Arts has released their Interactive Annual featuring some of this years best design on the web. The two winners that stand out the most in my eyes are Veer in the business category and Churchill And The Great Republic in the info design category. Veer is quite deserving of the honor for their elegant advertising, intuitive shopping process, and overall excellence in delivering an enjoyable, inspiring user experience. Their sales pitch is never gimmicky, its just useful information, and useful products. They are one of the few online businesses (besides Threadless) whose marketing is transparently suspended in a dedicated community of people who love design. Oh, and their design ain’t bad either.

Master story tellers Terra Incognita are the designers of Churchill And The Great Republic, yet another thoughtfully conceived project in their impressive portfolio. Their work is the gold standard for the successful integration of media to deliver complex stories that somehow seem so simple. They create passive paths through their content where a viewer can sit back and be entertained, or hop off the trolley at any point to investigate things more closely. Bart Marable, the humble genius who founded the company in 1995 and steers the ship as the creative director, was previously a guest lecturer at The Art Institute of Atlanta where I teach, and left quite an impression with the students and faculty in the Interactive Media Design department as a master of his craft yet modest and ready to share. It’s refreshing to encounter such a successful designer that hasn’t become drunk on his own ego. His articles about interactive story telling are great.

There are many more quality selections in the Communication Arts Interactive Annual from which to gain inspiration. The common theme in all projects is that concept drives great design.

Mark Boulton, a web designer out of the UK, will be self-publishing a PDF book entitled Five Simple Steps: Designing for the Web. Boutlon has offered some great design advice on his blog along these lines, advice that is quite sharp and worth heeding. The book will sell for $19 from his site, but you can get $5 off if you sign up for his mailing list. Seems like a fair trade to me. To get a taste of the quality of content and insights the book will cover, take a look at this post about typography on the web.

“Five Simple Steps: Designing for the web is a web design book with a difference. Too many design books show pretty pictures and don’t actually teach much. Five Simple Steps: Designing for the Web changes this by focusing on applying the core principles of graphic design to the web.”

- Mark Boulton

We’ve become very familiar with the various design techniques that make up the “Web 2.0 Design Style”. Rounded corners, excessive use of gradients, over-sized icons and type, image reflections, and the like are now so popular that articles list these design techniques as essential for joining Web 2.0 revolution. These trends are so well identified and dissected that you can even type your name into the Web 2.0 logo generator to attain Web 2.0 flair without any knowledge of design at all.

It seems we are all very excited about the great new technology and design that has created this miniature revolution on the web. The pitfall of such revolutions is that we run the risk of falling so head over heals in love with our new trends that we stop questioning why they are so wonderful, or if they are actually as wonderful as we think. We begin to imitate not communicate.

Shaun Inman has redesigned his web site recently in reaction to the Web 2.0 frenzy. His concept for his design is the passage of time, but the design consciously departs from many Web 2.0 trends. He uses a term I myself used last July when describing my goals for the design of this site; Web 2.No. Though Inman still uses over-sized type, a familiar trend of popular Web 2.0 sites, his design concept is engaging and creative. It transcends being just a style, and is a concept. The designers we tend to hold in high esteem like Jason Santa Maria, Joshua Davis, and Hillman Curtis all consistently forgo reliance on the vice of trendy styles for strong concepts, which is why we continually revisit their work for inspiration.

The Web 2.0 revolution has done great things for the web industry, inspiring design, technology, publicity, and injecting new energy into our work. There will soon come a point, though, where we will have to let go of our infatuation in order to build the next revolution that will propel us forward.