Inspiring words from Jason Santa Maria
At An Event Apart in New Orleans, Jason Santa Maria gave an inspiring talk on why Good Design Ain’t Easy. Here a few quotes from my notes of his presentation.
“The message comes first, it’s not about making everything look nice”
I’m so glad to hear someone say this. As a web designer our primary focus should be on creating a design that clearly conveys the message of the site, not on creating a graphical masterpiece that looks nice. Of course it never hurts to have very functional web site that looks good. Jason goes on to say,
“It’s not fair to compare print to the web. They are different animals”
When we design a website we need to break free from the print design mindset and realize that we are designing for the web. The web has different constraints and different objectives then print does. Also when we evaluate a web sites we need to evaluate them like we would different animals. Good web design is different then good print design.
3 Inspirational Web Design Quotes from Industry Leaders
I recently attended the “An Event Apart” web design conference in Seattle and came back with some inspirational quotes from some industry leaders including Eric Meyer, Jeffrey Zeldman, and Jeff Veen. If you are a web designer and don’t know who these people are, you should. They have made huge contributions to the web design world and constantly strive for standards. Here are three memorable quotes that give me inspiration when working on a design project. Hopefully they will inspire you.
“Writing for the web is important, it is an oportunity to establish our brand and help create a positive user experience”. - Jeffrey Zeldman
One of the biggest mistakes we can make as a designer is not to take into account the copy, or writing and text, that is used in our websites. The wordage that we use on our sites can be just as important, if not more important, than the design itself. Take for example Flickr. A minimalist, simple design with large personable wordage that really connects to a user. There are dozens of photo sites up there, but more people choose to use Flickr.
“By zeroing out syles, you can get a more consistent design. Your force yourself to set styles”. -Eric Meyer
Meyer is referring to the practice of resetting your styles at the beginning of a design project. Most people do this by including a style sheet called “reset.css” which set’s many values to 0 (e.g. margin: 0; padding: 0;). A CSS reset is a way to start from scratch. Keep in mind that all CSS attributes, even though they are not in your style sheet, are in fact styled. By resetting them you get a clean slate and can give you peace of mind when styling your site. Check out Eric Meyers page on the CSS reset for more details and good practice.
“We have the power to make people enjoy life”. - Andy Budd
As web designers we can have an impact in a persons happiness. People choose to use the internet for a variety of reasons, but mostly to get enjoyment. By designing sites in a way that engages the user, we can bring enjoyment to their experience and keep them coming back. You can see this happening in the Web 2.0 era through design and utilizing newer technologies such as blogs and ajax which make sites more interactive and engaging. By using these techniques and technologies you can take your site to the next level.
Check back soon for 3 more inspirational quotes.