Author Archive

“So you want to be a farmer, eh? Farming ain’t easy, boy, but it’s honest work and it puts food on the table. How much do you know about it?”
“Not much, but I’d like to get started right away.”
“I like your attitude, boy! Ever had a garden?”
“No. Never really wanted one.”
“Hm. Well, maybe I could start you plantin’ some corn. That ain’t too hard, and it’s good for learnin’ how to put the seeds in right, plus I could take the time to cover some of the basics about weather signs.”
“What are you talking about? I don’t want to plant seeds or hear about the weather, of all things. I want to be a farmer.”
“You all there in the head, boy? How else do you plan to grow food, if you don’t plant seeds and keep the fields watered and fertilized? How do you expect to have your crops make it without knowin’ about the weather?”
“Why would I want to dig in the dirt or listen to boring lectures about meteorology, when all I want is to be a farmer?”

“So you want to be a sculptor, eh? Well, it’s a long and difficult road, but full of rewards for those who can master the skills. To start out with, here’s a hammer, a chisel, and a block of soapstone. Try sculpting a sphere, and then we’ll see–”
“Excuse me, but I’m not interested in chipping away at rock. I just want to be a great sculptor.”
“What?”
“I said, I’m not interested–”
“I heard you. I just didn’t understand what you meant.”
“The goal of a sculptor is to create art, right? That’s what I want to do, create art, not fiddle with these silly tools or get stone dust all over me.”
“Wait just a minute. You’re saying that you want to be a sculptor but you don’t want to learn how to chisel stone? That you’re not interested in learning the properties of granite, marble, and so on?”
“That’s right. Why would I?”
“Well, now I’ve heard everything! Listen, you can’t be a sculptor without understanding the nature of stone. It’s just not possible.”
“Don’t be absurd. Maybe all that stuff is interesting to you, but I’m an artist. Creation is my business, and frankly it’s a mystery to me why you think I should be bothered with anything else. Now, are you going to teach me to sculpt or not?”

“So you want to be a graphic designer, eh? Graphic design has a long and noble tradition, as Edward Tufte has made abundantly clear in his various works, and these days it’s done as much on computers as on paper. Accordingly, it’s important to know as much about computers and programs like Illustrator as it is to know about paper and ink. Furthermore, no matter what medium is used, it’s critical to have insight into the human brain and perceptual senses, color theory, and a great deal more. I’m sorry, did you have a question?”
“Yes. When do I start designing?”
“Well, of course you’ll be doing some basic design work as you study all the aspects of design I just mentioned, of course. After all, one of the best ways to learn is to do.”
“No, no. You talked about a lot of stuff that doesn’t interest me. All I want to do is design, not be subjected to a lot of boring stuff like learning computer programs and psychology.”
“Maybe you weren’t paying attention. Understanding those things is necessary in order to be a designer. Without them, you’re just scribbling. How can you hope to create a great design without understanding how your work is perceived? The wrong color palette, for example, can completely undermine your message; or, alternatively, be deliberately chosen in order to intentionally undermine it, thus giving the design an extra layer of meaning.”
“You really believe all that, don’t you? Sad. Look, just because you think that kind of thing is interesting doesn’t mean that you should go around forcing it on other people. I’m here to be a designer, not a psychologist or a computer geek or whatever else you think I should be instead.”
“Look, if you’re not willing to learn the basics, then maybe design isn’t for you.”
“Oh, sure, whenever someone isn’t willing to quietly swallow your pretensions, you declare them unfit to join your holy order, is that it? The only people who can be designers are the ones who think just like you, right? The ones who play your little games and jump through the hoops you set up? You just keep stroking your ivory tower, okay? Just stop pretending that you know what makes a good designer, because it’s clear you’ve become completely dissociated from reality.”

“So you want to be a web designer, eh? Well, that’s fine, just fine! There’s a lot to learn, but I’d be happy to get you started. First, we’ll talk about markup languages and semantics. Then we’ll spend a good deal of time on how CSS works and how it compares to older forms of layout, plus a basic grounding in the nature of text flow and ‘limitless canvas’ flows. After that–”
“Hold on there, Poindexter. I want to be a web designer, not a computer scientist.”

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You’re a Web designer, right? You fascist oppressor. What gives you the right to be so arrogant and close-minded?

Amazing, isn’t it? We’ve only just met and here I am insulting and berating you. And you don’t even know why, though you might have some idea.

Let me clear it up for you: in your last three design projects, you excluded visitors, ran roughshod over user expectations, and generally displayed a lack of understanding of the medium. This is the case no matter what design techniques you used; no matter whose books you read; no matter what you did. You thug.

What the blinking font am I talking about? I’m talking about Web design, which requires a constant balancing of pros and cons, and which does not admit to universally applicable answers. Unfortunately, this means that when you make a choice in how to style your site, you’re going to annoy somebody. Change that decision, and you’ll annoy somebody different.

Let’s take the eternal debate of fixed versus liquid (or fluid or elastic or jello or whatever term you prefer) layout. On the one hand, you have the ability to set your design layout at a fixed width, using pixels or ems or some other fixed unit of measure. This has the advantage of giving you a more-or-less controlled design space, and as a bonus can help overcome some annoying positioning bugs in IE/Win. On the down side, if a user has a really wide browser window, then there’s a whole bunch of white space to the sides of the design’s content; alternatively, a very narrow browser window will invoke the dreaded horizontal scrollbar (eeeek!).

The other choice is to go fluid (or liquid or whatever), using mainly percentages to define the widths of layout areas. The win here is that your content will always fill the browser window, or at least some portion of it, regardless of that window’s width. No ugly leftover whitespace! On the other hand, users with really wide windows will get really long lines of text, which most people find difficult to read; at the other end, a really narrow window can mean single-word lines of text or, worse, some content overlapping other content.

Given the nature of the Web, you picked one or the other of these layout techniques. In so doing, you alienated some users. How dare you be so exclusive?

Okay, okay, time for a confession: I don’t really think you were being exclusive, or arrogant, or a fascist when you made your design decisions. But there are those out there who do, and believe me, I’ve heard from them. You may have as well. Here’s my point: you can never satisfy everyone with your choices of Web design techniques. It is simply not possible.

Let’s consider another ancient Holy War: font sizing. You have pixel-set text, and then you have “scaled” text that uses ems or percentages. The former is more visually predictable, but can’t be resized in IE/Win; the latter is a slippery beast, and can yield inconsistent results between browsers.So you have an approach that reduces accessibility and an approach that reduces design fidelity. Which will you choose? Let’s say you pick “scaled” text, believing that some loss of predictability is worth the accessibility gains. I hope it’s one of those spiffy new Web 2.0 sites with the big friendly fonts, because if you drop the text size so much as a percentage point below the user’s default, you’re arrogantly assuming that you know better than the user what size text should be. After all, if they wanted text to be smaller, they’d have configured their browser appropriately, right?

Wrong. You and I both know this doesn’t happen. Even people with genuine accessibility needs are by and large unaware of the accessibility features already available in their browsers. Just about nobody ever changes their default text size on purpose, and only a few do it by accident (try holding the Control key down while you use your mouse’s scroll wheel in an Explorer window some time).

And yet, those who push the “no font smaller than 100%” point of view are still users, no more or less than the ones who don’t know what a font is. If you leave text sizes alone, you’re potentially annoying one set of users by making the text big and clunky; make the text smaller so it looks better for most people, and you’re annoying those who actually did configure their browsers to default to 12-pixel text. Plus you’re also annoying people who browser the Web with CAD-level monitors that have a zillion pixels per inch and so draw 11-pixel text like it’s on a microfiche. (Trust me, they’re out there.)

So what’s the single perfect solution to font sizing? There is none. As with layout types, you have to weigh the alternatives and pick the solution that best fits the project and the audience. Once you’ve made your decision, you need to remember that some fraction of your users will be annoyed and possibly offended, if they’re particularly thin-skinned. Keeping that fraction as small as possible is a sensible goal; trying to bring it down to zero is a fool’s errand.

This is no great revelation to you, I’m sure, but it’s something I feel needs to be strongly restated. Web design has come a long way, but it’s still an immature field. The technology is not so advanced that we can solve these problems once and for all. Even if we had the technology to do so, I’m not convinced that we even know what the best solutions would be. Sure, there are plenty of opinions, but precious little study and still less experience. That may seem a strange thing to say about a 13-year-old field, but it’s true. The Web is rapidly becoming more than 640×480 versus 800×600 versus 1024×768; now we have cellphones and PDAs and kiosks and wall displays to worry about. How can you design in such a way to accomodate different platforms. The probable answer is that you can’t: you design separately for each class of display. But that’s just my opinion, backed up by nothing more than my view of the world and my time spent in it.

At a certain point, there are no certain answers. Yes, there are many known facts in Web design. JPEGs are better than GIFs for photographs; GIFs are better than JPEGs for line art. (And PNGs are better than everything else, including sponge cake with buttercream frosting and sprinkles, but browser support has held them in limbo for most of a decade now.)

Past those, you have to draw on your experience and professional judgment to pick a given design approach. You have to make a judgment call, one that will appear wrong to some fraction of your users. You have to accept this when you consider what kind of a site you’re creating and who its audience will be, carefully weigh the choices you have to make, and pick the ones that best serve the project’s needs. That involves knowing the circumstances in which your decisions will break down (e.g., a fixed-width design in a very wide browser window) as well as those in which they’ll work wonderfully.

When you minimize the former and maximize the latter, when you bring user complaints to a minimum by bringing your skills to bear on the problem that faces you, then you’ve done your job and done it well. Be proud of that, and don’t let anyone take it away from you.