Web design and print design share *some* characteristics, Matthew. I also share some characteristics with a mountain gorilla, but I'm not a mountain gorilla. In a similar way, the Web is an evolutionary cousin of print and other media. Many fundamental design principles do carry over to web design. Some don't.
Among other things, I'm an accessibility advocate. The various markup languages used in web design were meant from the start to serve up content in accessible ways, and this idea of doing handwritten design might be OK for very limited use -- maybe for a site on the topic of excellent handwriting, or handwriting analysis. To use it extensively would be a real headache if you did it as the standards require. So a more polite way of saying "this is crap" would be to say "I don't like headaches." The point where we may diverge is this: "If it works, it works." What does that mean? If it's standards-compliant and semantically structured AND attractive and functional, it works. Otherwise, it just looks good. The thing that riles me about that statement is that it carries this underlying assumption: If it works for ME, it will work for EVERYONE. And that's not true. On one level, design is design. All disciplines share certain principles of good design. But you don't design a 20-story building with the exact same engineering principles used in designing a kite, even though the two can have significant aesthetic similarities. A highway engineer doesn't design a complex interchange to LOOK good first, without regard to function, and I think the Smashing Magazine article encourages just that kind of thinking. Web design isn't just what we see and experience on the browser du jour. There's a bunch of important stuff under the hood. My personal feelings of aesthetic like or dislike aside, I don't call a design "good" unless it also satisfies the basic rules of structure and accessibility. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Posted from the new ixda.org http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=29152 ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
