lovehistory.net

I’ll admit to being pretty captivated by White Space is Not Your Enemy. Whether I’m good at it or not, I love design, and the book had me so keyed up I kept having to put it down move to my computer so that I could test out the ideas contained in its pages (the font chapter, in particular, proved a huge distraction). In other words, I couldn’t wait to start drawing.

I have never thought of myself as a visual artist. I can barely draw a recognizable stick figure with pen and paper (or cursor and MS Paint). And I am guilty of making webpages decorated with squirming gifs, colored scroll bars, and cursors trailing glitter. Then again, it was the 90s and I was 15. Lucky for me somewhere along the line I aged, the 90s ended, and I fell in with some graphic designers who taught me about white space and simplicity. The challenge of designing websites and graphics that adhered to rules of usability focused and motivated me in a way that I still find to be surprising.

I was already aware of many of the amateur errors listed in Chapter 4 and sometimes choose to ignore them when I’m playing around, as the slap-dash (soon-to-be-redone) design of historiclove.com’s index page clearly demonstrates (see: justified text, a background image, questionable header design choices), but knowing the rules and being able to implement them are two different things. Web design and the execution of that design are very time consuming, difficult, and often frustrating things. Every time I sit down, no matter how simple the visual I have in my head, I find myself still tinkering hours later. But it’s so incredibly rewarding when you finally get it just right. For example, finding that perfect font.

Having read this book and also the design requirements built into our course’s syllabus, I’m excited to meld Golombisky and Hagen’s design guidelines with our assignments. I will be paying much more conscious attention to the way my design elements direct visual flow. I’m particularly interested in the idea of matching the design of our projects to the design aesthetic of the time period that our projects will focus on. I’m a true believer that subtle (or not-so-subtle) visual cues make an incredible difference in design experience, especially on web pages, which are active, interactive experiences, as opposed to passive ones. The course readings this week suggest useful ways for us to facilitate and guide our users’ experience of our sites. And thankfully programs such as Photoshop and Dreamweaver (which I am also excited to finally learn) make constructing such visual creations possible for people like me. Now I just have to figure out the content I’m going to be drawing about!

I have commented on Martha’s blog this week.