commanderW - 8:17 pm on Dec 12, 2009 (gmt 0)

Now that I actually have 5 sites up, I think I can finally make a contribution here. There are 2 major things I bring to my own design.

First - I spend ( and have spent) an incredible amount of time 'surfing'. I pay attention to how things effect me. My personal experience on various sites. I know what not to do, from this. It is an artists approach. science analyses things in a way that is guaranteed to eliminate personal opinion and bias from the process. An artist, however, does the exact opposite. They look at other peoples art, and pay attention to the experience. How different images and techniques effect them. Then they apply this personal knowledge to their own creations. There are a lot of valuable scientific studies related to web design and usability. They are not mutually exclusive to the artistic process.

Second - I have spent an even more incredible amount of time reading books. I also did my time as a paste up and layout artist in the days before the desk top computer. Web designers shouldn't forget that people have been working on page layout, and readability, and intelligibility, since Gutenberg. Look at books and magazines and newspapers. There is a lot of intelligence in many of their design decisions. An interesting thing I have noticed in books from the 1500's-1600's is that in many, on the bottom right of every page, is the first word that is going to appear on the next page. At the top left of every page, is the last word of the previous page. This is telling. Obviously, people then had a hard time keeping track of a sentence when they had to break off and turn the page to read the end of it :-) This was an early solution to one of the earliest problems of 'navigation'. I am not suggesting that this particular technique be revived for the web. I just want to remark on it. - You can find digital facsimiles of antique books at the World Digital Library [wdl.org], and universities and museum websites around the world.

My personal peeve - Giant newspaper style masthead at the top of every web page! (One of the few things modern web designers have taken from print media. But note how the masthead of a newspaper is only on the front page !) I really hate how every page on the web has the top third to one half of the page taken up by the same logo and motto and mission statement and blah blah blah. It is mentally and physically exhausting to have to scroll down every single page to get to the content of that page. Logos can be small and in a corner. My web design motto is " The Fun Starts at the Top of the Page! "

THe Best Advice I Can Give - Read the posts on webmasterworld.com at breakfast every morning for at least one year.