Webdesign IS design, dammit!

I was browsing the ideas page of boxes and arrows. Christina posted an article to a great article by Lance Arthur under the digg-savvy idea title Webdesign is dead. It got my creative juices going and my comment ended up being such an essay that I thought I would reproduce it here for you all to enjoy!

----------------------

Ever since my first "real" IT job where I was exposed to a lot of designers and printers (courtesy of working for an Apple reseller) I have had a love affair with type. Graphic design too, but especially type and typographical layout. One of my favourite ways to fill a few spare minutes was to leaf through font sample books from various font foundries or tweak a font in fontographer (ah memories).

Being forced to limit oneself to HTML was a hard change for me. I remember when I first discovered http/HTML (late 1992 if I remember correctly, when one of my favourite gopher sites release a newfangled web version), the delivery mechanism excited me, and it was all ascii at first, so layout wasn't even an issue. Then came Mosaic. At first it was exciting, but then I realised the awful truth: it resulted in the destruction of the clean, simple, structural purity of plain-text html; and yet it did not deliver sufficient power to actually display good design.

Now with the advent of XHTML/CSS we are in a better situation. We can get an even better, more pure, structural mark-up of data, while simultaneously being able to display it in a pleasing way. Still, we are stuck in a place where what is possible is dictated to us by the CSS standards committee and the browser implementations thereof.

Changing tack for a moment, let's think about what it is that we use the web for - what information are we normally displaying? Or more pertinent here, what design tools do we need for what we are trying to communicate?

I like the following paragraph in Lance's article:

First off, I like distinct areas of separation. As you can see here, I used spacing and borders to set off the sections, giving the main content more weight by making it bright and big and stage centre. The headlines are also rather weighty, so that finding each article on the main page is simple, but the headlines are not so large that they outweigh the content itself.

Here is a person actually thinking about the style of the communication first. So many people say they are designing a "style" when really they are designing a "look". Like a human conversation, a web site/page communicates in so many ways. The page style/layout. The navigation. The typographical layout. The style of writing. The collaboration tools on offer. You might think I'm talking hogwash, but imagine you are reading a paragraph in a company "blog" You read the phrase "we value our customers feedback" and then you notice that they have comments disabled. That is communicating something, and it's the opposite of what the words are saying. It's interesting to note that there are more possible "communication parameters" in web publishing than traditional publishing, and yet web publishing is rarely approached with the same vigour as is traditional publishing.

After the above quoted paragraph, Lance goes on to talk about the colour palette which shows that at least he is applying some vigour - lets have more of it I say!

So anyway - this isn't quite on the topic of "Webdesign is dead", but I think a more interesting/useful title would be "Webdesign IS design dammit!" or perhaps "Will webdesign for typefaces" ;) The latter only makes sense to those of us who remember when real typefaces cost > $100 not the $19.95 they do now.