Articles Written by Linda Goin
In this last article of the series, Linda continues to show how you can learn from other websites by observing them carefully and noting down how they match up to the design elements and principles she’s been writing about.
In this article Linda will be building on her first deconstruction lesson and giving you a real insight into browsing the web with your “designer’s eyes” open.
In this weeks article Linda is going to carry out a detailed deconstruction of a very carefully thought out commercial website, to show how the different aspects of web design are brought together to build an excellent web experience.
In highlighting the craftsmanship involved in this site, Linda will consolidate your learning. Furthermore this article will help you to appreciate the work and detail behind a lovely site, that not only works on it’s own terms but fully reflects the image of the person behind it.
Over the past few months we focused on design elements and how to use these elements in our web designs. However, we still need to understand how these elements combine to form design principles. This week, we’ll view several sites to understand these principles, or design rules. By rules, I mean rules that can be broken, but only if we understand how they work in the first place. So, we’ll take these principles step-by-step, because each one is achieved through all the design elements.
So many sites either have no texture, or are else over-textured through (ahem) enthusiastic use of Photoshop or other image editors. In this tutorial, Linda discusses decorative texture as an integral part of web design when done properly. The tutorial concludes with a check-list of design elements and principles to be taken account when designing texture for your web site.
Last week we took a look at monochromatic, analogous and complementary colour schemes, and viewed a few samples of these harmonies from the web. This week, we’ll study triad and tetrad colour schemes, and we’ll also see how colour can be used as a depth clue. We will work with the same colour wheel as we did last week for continuity, and at the end of the article I’ll include links for further research into colour harmonies for the web.
There are times when a client might own several subsidiaries or branches within a main company, and each branch may have its own “personality.” How do you design a site a site like this? What design elements do you change, and which elements should stay the same? In today’s article, Linda deconstructs a site - Peter Gabriel’s record company, Real World - to illustrate how the designers maintained unity throughout a site with a repetition of colour, layout, and images. The designers assigned each subdivision of this site a colour, and these colours are introduced on the homepage links.
There’s nothing worse than a crowded, busy web site. Everyone needs some space in their design - but what’s the best way to manage that space? Linda looks how fine artists in the past have organised their paintings and perspective, and shows how the rules still apply to making pleasing web design. With an extensive links section and bibliogrpahy, Linda shows how to present your excellent content in a way that will make your sites stand out from the crowd, looking professional and pleasing to your clients and your audience.
“Content is king”, they say. But they also say “presentation is everything”. You’ve got all your database stuff working, your content is written, edited, proofed .. and yet, somehow, the web page lacks that certain something. Linda helps you add that something special by guiding you through the design considerations of shape and typography - that’s the shape of the paragraphs and images, and the shape of the actual letters themselves to lift your great content into the realm of the brilliant.
In today’s tutorial, Linda discusses that fundamental component of design, the line. It’s particularly relevant to web design, which has traditionally been based around tables and is now moving to CSS boxes. We look at different cultural responses to line, how lines make symmetry and how symmetry provokes a response from the viewer, helping him or her subconsciously judge whether a site “means business”, is trustworthy, stable and responsible - vital design characteristics if you’re designing a business site for yourself or your client!
For many of us, especially those from a coding background, we know good design when we see it, but find it very difficult to replicate it, or even describe why it appeals to us. Trained artist, Linda Goin begins this new series, which is a crash course to help newbies and coders understand why they like a design, how to adapt it without stealing it, and how to come up with sparkling new designs of their own.
These entries link to online articles I've written with or without my byline.
