Now, I know we just read a lot of theory about the purpose, audience, and strategy of web authoring, but now we’re going to turn to the theory of design. When I first started learning about web design and authorship, I didn’t realize that there’s actually quite a lot of theory that goes into how web sites look, so I think that going through the principles of design theory is going to be very helpful for once you actually get to the manual labor of actually creating your site.
So, once again, we will turn to our lovely friend, Jesse James Garrett for advice on design theory.
We should start with a conceptual model of how we want our site to look. It’s a lot easier to change our minds about how something should look when it’s still on paper or in writing than when you’re five pages deep in code.
The Concept is created from the needs of the user and the expectations of the creator. We talked a bit about this in the “Define” page, but it becomes more important here. As Garrett points out, often what’s easiest for the creator of the product is not what’s easiest for the user. However, sometimes what is easiest for the user is just impractical for the creator to implement because of monetary, temporal, or technical limitations. So, the conceptual model is the relationship between those two tensions:
The concept of the site quickly blurs together with what Garrett defines as the “Skeleton plane,” which is where we begin to make some of the intangible needs more concrete. This mostly relates to how we are going to lay out information on the website, and what makes the most sense for your (and your consumer's) needs!
Some questions to think about:
Finally, we have arrived at the final plane of Garrett’s plan – the Surface plane. This is where all the planning you’ve done for the last several steps gets put into action.
The surface is where you make decisions about how your website will look that are more aesthetically driven. Because we’ve already done the hard work of defining and designing the important functions and information of the site, we can now focus on the fun things, like colors, backgrounds, font types, and pictures!
However, there’s still quite a lot of theory that goes into these decisions. There are countless theories about color meaning, the feelings of fonts, and the importance of white space in design; and all of these things will impact how your user interacts with your website.
So, before you begin adding crazy colors, templates, and other aesthetic deviances in your design, remember that everything should be geared towards the effective communication of your purpose for the best web experience for your user.
