Design Matters

There is a huge debate today over whether design is essential. With the clean-look, minimalist, web 2.0 surge, the web has become far less about your basic css/xhtml look and feel, and far more about programmatic functionality and application development. Personally, I think this is a good thing. I’m far more interested in design than programming, but I still agree that form is utterly useless without powerful, secure, sensible functionality.

Having said that, I search all the time for search terms like “web design” just to see what’s out there. I’ll not point names (or provide links) but I must say I’m appalled at some of the absolutely terrible design that exists among sites owned by web designers. Obviously there are multitudes of exceptions, but it often seems as though people in web design really don’t care a whole lot about design…

I’ve noticed what I consider to be significant problems in basic design concepts all over the web. For example: inconsistent font sizing (and non-accessible sizing), inconsistent padding from one element to the next, crazy color schemes like red and pink… together… right next to each other (if you won’t wear it, don’t design with it), low resolution graphics used where nice clean text could appear (what’s the point of posting a picture of something written in Arial font?), old-fashioned bevels and tiled, repeating backgrounds with strange edges.

You might expect to find these designs on a site produced by Uncle Jethro’s Body Shop, Shoe Repair, and Web Design (no offense to you if that’s really the name of your business…). But on the sites of supposedly savvy individuals called web designers?

You might be thinking it, so I’ll just say it. I have a long way to go myself – I’m a growing designer. But I feel I can tell the difference between clean and cluttered, clear and crazy. Let’s keep it clean, folks! The whole industry will benefit!