Ryan Boswell [dot] com
Three Design Approaches
One of my favorite web design and development blogs, Smashing Magazine, published a piece today describing the three most common approaches to web design and development, Web Designer as The Artist, Scientist And Philosopher.
I have to say that their write up is very accurate (as it should be, given who the authors are), and it is so very true that while most of us come primarily from one of the three, we have adapted to fill the other roles as needed.
For me, I’m more of the Scientist. I love coding, it’s my passion and hobby. Ever since I started designing and developing websites, I have loved coding. I’ve never really liked using desktop-based WYSIWYG editors for websites like Frontpage and Dreamweaver, and I even switch to the HTML mode in WordPress‘ post editor more often than not (I happen to be using the Visual editor this time, but stil …).
The Artist is the second most-developed side of my talents, at least at this point. I’ll admit, I’m not the most skilled web designer. I don’t have as much experience and skill with Photoshop and many of my peers, and flashy, cool graphics just aren’t something I can do for the most part. But then again, my personal design taste has always been a more modern, clean-line, and simple one. I prefer to do all of my design elements using almost pure HTML/CSS rather than images (and this is becoming easier and easier with HTML 5 and CSS 3). I am working to fix this with more and more experimentation in using and creating images more effectively in my work.
The Philosopher is the least developed approach, but I’m working hard on improving my skills here. Lately I’ve been spending more and more time thinking about the best way to design an interface to something. One of my favorite examples, even if by no means a unique idea, is the contact form on this website. Rather than just have a typical, character-less form, I decided to take an idea I’ve seen in my places, make it a little more fun and interesting for the person that’s sending me a note, as you can see in the image to the left. I’ve also extended this approach to posting a comment on my blog, as you can see below.
Mastery of all three approaches is key to creating unique and relevant websites and web applications in today’s world, where tools such as WordPress, MoveableType, among dozens of others, make it relatively easy for almost anyone to slap up a website. It’s up to the web designers and developers of the internet to strive to continue to raise the bar on what is expected of the websites and web applications we use.
