What is web design

<br />Original article: http://www.alistapart.com/articles/understandingwebdesign
Author: Jeffrey Zeldman Please indicate the original text and translator when reprinting, thank you!
After understanding our media we can design better. However, at this late stage of cultural development, there are still many people who do not understand what web design is. Among them, we can find many famous business and cultural leaders, as well as a small number of senior designers - unless his design involves the web.
Some people who don't know anything about web design are still creating websites, or managing web designers and developers. Others who don't know anything about web design are still accusing us of "professionalism" on behalf of people other than us. These people at least know how to make more noise, they make accusations, slam doors, and throw money at completely the wrong people and things.
If we want better positions, better jobs, and more informed users, then we must start by educating ourselves. More like real estate than architecture. If you don’t know what the web is, it’s hard to understand what web design is. People who are asked to explain it either don’t get the point, or force some business reason they know, with barnumesque splendor.
The news media is also often misunderstood. Too much of the Internet journalism is focused on profit, and very little covers real art and ideas. Editors are driven by publishers worried about advertisers, and even those journalists who understand the web spend most of their time writing about deals and bidders. So many people do this that their statements are so obviously self-serving and ridiculous that they are like Zuckerberg's Law (http://valleywag.com/tech/valleyspeak/zuckerbergs-law-once-every-hundred-years-media-changes-320289.php)
This isn't to say that Zuckerberg's story isn't news; nor is it to say that journalists shouldn't be writing about it. But focusing on business and ignoring everything else is like covering real estate and ignoring architecture.
Equally annoying is the one-sided story, which tells us: In 1994, the Internet was incredible and wild. In 1999, the Internet was king. In 2001, the dot-com bubble crashed. In 2002, citizen journalism discovered blogs. In 2004, a guest on CNN blogged about how citizen journalists were reshaping journalism and democracy and would determine who won that year's presidential election. I forget how this came about.
When the absurd prediction of absurdity died, nobody in the editorial office resigned, they just put a new line in the water - just like a salesman changes a slogan. After decades of commercialization of news, there are so many good broadcasters still, but few dare to present the truth of the matter in public. Sometimes you can even hear screams and heckling below him. The cycle of self-interest is not the only thing that makes mistakes, professional associations make mistakes every day, and every year they celebrate the anniversary of their mistakes. Every year, advertising and design magazines and professional organizations hold a competition for "New Media Design", judged by last year's winners. What they call "New Media Design" tells us everything (design trends), but does not constrain them (winners).
There will be some exceptions, but the overwhelming majority of winners will be the web as a medium where users passively accept advertising and marketing competition for Flash and video content. For active users, it's a game. But for you and me, active web usage is probably limited to clicking a "Digg this page" button.
Screenshots of the winning sites are mythically listed in glossy design yearbooks. When the winners become the deciders, they reward sites that are similar to their own designs. Thus the web behaves like television, and what is considered good is churned out, and a generation of users and art directors come to believe that this approach is the pie in the sky for web design. Design critics also make the mistake of being at home in print and not necessarily being as smart on the web. Their critical talents, fully developed in battles over kerning, make no difference to the difficulties of our profession.
The unsophisticated ones will lament over the ugly fonts we use. They will wonder aloud how we can thrive in a field where we don’t have absolute control over every visual element. They will secretly wonder if we are really designers at all. (They suspect we are not.) These are the beginners, the design students or the future critics. The people who are interested in their opinions are mainly their professors, and hopefully they have one.
Senior critics understand that the web is not print, and that the limitations of various designs are different. Yet these theorists occasionally succumb to unjustified comparisons. (I did this myself, albeit long ago and strictly to my own liking.) These critics cry: Where is the masterpiece of web design? Google Maps is probably what Leonardo's Mona Lisa is to our age. Equally brilliant in a different field. This answer will satisfy most of us, but it will not satisfy design critics who are looking for parallels to focus on. Oh! I don't know, let's just say Glaser's icons and Bob Dylan's posters... Print, architecture and web design The problem is this: web design, while using the principles of graphic design and illustration, is not entirely suited to them. If you must compare the web to any other medium, then print is a good choice. For web design, like a typeface, is the context for other people. I'll tell you about that website design in a moment.
Architecture (the kind that uses steel, glass, and stone) is also a more relevant analogy - or at least, more relevant than poster design. Architects construct plans and diagrams to facilitate dynamic human behavior, and after designing, the architect relinquishes control. Over time, the people who use the building begin to speak and subjectively add meaning to the architect's design. (Hints and hindsight)
Of course, all comparisons are inherently crude. What is "London Calling" on television? Who is the Jane Austen of car design? Madame Butterfly is not less beautiful because she doesn't have car chases, and peanut butter is not less delicious because it can't dance. So, what is web design?
Web design is not book design, nor is it poster design. It is not illustration, and the highest achievements of these disciplines are not what web design aims to achieve. Although websites can host game or video systems, and those systems are interesting to look at, these websites are examples of game design or video storytelling, not web design. So, what is web design?
Web design is about creating artifacts that facilitate and encourage human behavior in digital environments, that reflect or adapt to individual expressions and needs, and that evolve gracefully over time while always maintaining their identity.
Let us repeat it with emphasis:
Web design is about creating artifacts that facilitate and encourage human behavior in digital environments, that reflect or adapt to individual expression and satisfaction, and that evolve gracefully over time while always retaining their identity. It gets more beautiful. Great web design is like great typefaces: Some, like "Rosewood," impose a personality on whatever content they're applied to. Others, like "Helvetica," blend into the background (or try to), magically supporting all content no matter what it's like. (We can discuss whether Helvetica is really like neutral water someday.)
What kind of web design is like this? (Helvetica) For example, Douglas Bowman's white "Minima" blog layout, used by millions of authors - and it feels like their personal design. That's great design.
Great web design is like great buildings. All office buildings, no matter how unique, have a lobby, bathrooms, and staircases. Websites are the same; they need some common features.
Although a great website design is completely individual, it still has a lot of functionality in common with other websites. The same is true of great magazine and newspaper layouts, even if they differ in hundreds of details from the stereotypical magazine and newspaper layouts. Few people praise great magazine layouts, but millions of people consciously or unconsciously accept them, and no one is sad that they are not posters.
Inexperienced or unthoughtful designers complain that too many sites use grids, too many sites use columns, and too many sites are boxy. They've been trying to avoid boxiness since 1995, and when they occasionally succeed, they're often aesthetically pleasing and usability-wise miserable.
An experienced web designer, like a talented newspaper art editor, agrees that many of the projects she works on have headers, columns, and footers. Her job is not to complain about the commonplace, but to use these commonplace layouts to create something distinctive, natural, appropriate to the subject, sophisticated and memorable, quietly yet clearly moving.
If she achieves all these details, her work will be very beautiful. Not everyone will appreciate this beauty, because not everyone understands web design. Then, let us stop crying about web design and turn to those who cannot see this beauty.

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