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Web design is about designing

Posted by Massimo Sgrelli in Design - Web 2.0 - 2 comments

It seems pretty obvious, but it isn’t. I assure you that.
I’ve just read Amy Hoy article “Design is not about solving problems” on Slash7 and I agree with her. She focused on the proactive role in designing, blaming the reactive role that design could have. Design is not about solving problems.

But I’d like to go further, remarking the obvious: design is about designing. Understanding the domain language (as recalled by Ryan Singer ), sketching the whole project down, positioning objects on a surface to fulfill the need and then build a mock-up. That is design. Web design makes no objections to this rule, but for sure it adds some constraints to the general process: the format. If a web designer builds up the complete idea of a project, without worrying about the final format of his work, he will probably have to plan a big rework. That project must be implemented by a software developer, so the format of the designer’s final object is fundamental.

Too often people speak different languages:

They simply don’t fit and sometimes tools don’t help a lot. This is why the big challenge is to forget about Photoshop and start promoting tools closer to the bare HTML.

HTML is composed by simple shapes. You can easily draw a rectangle, a square, color them, even blur the background. And again, set the font family, the boldness. Adding some AJAX you can get awesome effects… in a simple way. They are good and easily implemented, but you must study the fundamental of web development, the fundamental of browser rendering dialect.

People can keep basing their design work on tools like Photoshop, but they have to keep in mind that software developers will need user interface design objects in bare HTML/CSS format

If you are use to apply your work through a specific set of tools, it’s very difficult to change your habits in a short time. To train myself in this way I change the tools I use quite often, but of course I have my favorite tools too. At the moment I love using office tools like Keynote or PowerPoint to design web applications. They help you draw simple shapes and words quickly, and they avoid you to design hard things to implement.

In any case, independently from the tools I like to use, I’ve learned to sketch my ideas on paper first. That’s absolutely faster and cheaper than any software tool on earth.
I make a drawing and then I take a picture of it with my (i)phone to record it on WhoDoes. The drawing phase starts days later.

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