Designing for the web is di!erent than designing for any other medium. The breadth of skills required is sometimes daunting. The depth of experience required, seemingly unobtainable. Yet, the medium attracts designers from all spheres of design practice: from engineering and architecture, to product and graphic design. This chapter aims to provide a snapshot of the current state of the medium, and our role as practitioners working within it.
In the first few weeks, they had us drawing type and grids on a drawing board. I felt more like an architecture student than a typography student. Wasn’t I supposed to be working on a Mac? Surely that’s what designers need to know?
In the past few years, I’ve begun to understand the simple lessons I was learning back then. To really get to grips with letterforms, you have to draw them. Even now, I loosely hand!render type in my sketchbook. If the type is a sans!serif, I hand!render a sans serif. If I plan on using Georgia, I hand! render a close approximation.
As design for the World Wide Web is maturing, we are seeing a growing appreciation and willingness to learn good graphic design practice. Studios such as Happy Cog, and Coudal Partners, whose adoption of simple, powerful graphic design as a central service of their o"erings, have been influential. Now, three years on, we see a constant chatter about grid systems and good typography. A few people are even art directing.
Simple, sophisticated graphic design is making a shift from the o#ine world to the web as more designers are finding that the tools which were formerly so constrictive ! the browsers ! now allow them to create the layouts that once were di$cult or impossible. The web is looking good, and will only get better.
Originally devised over three years ago, and announced over two years ago, this book has moved far beyond the original idea of rehashing some old blog posts. Some articles are still included, but mostly, this book has been written from scratch, and is based on the premise that was central to those original blog posts: Five Simple Steps to Designing for the Web.
