Design Importance

Design touches everything.  The importance of design hinges on the ability to set goals/intentions and work towards solutions to the defined problem.  "Good" design has been the hot topic on the tongues of every potent New Media Designer as of late.  It seems that the crux of this situation lays on a thread-thin fine-line between functionality and presentation.  "Good" web related design MUST: captivate, navigate, and inform.



The following video "Everything You Know About Web Design Is Wrong" is a poignant lecture by Dan Willis given at last years SXSW Interactive.  Here Willis suggests that the purpose of design is to solve problems.  He discusses visual design as a means to an end and the need for modern designers to transcend the traditional print model.


Here in this second video Dr. Dave Chaffey discusses "Mistakes In Web Design".   Chaffey suggests that current web related design is not balanced and that there is  a struggle between acceptability verses a compelling experience.  He also speaks about clarification in regards to the content of each page of  a web site and  the need for basic search engine optimization to be integrated by web designers.  

 

In this last video, Chaffey suggests that a site's design architecture must be flexible so that new ideas can be developed and tried out.  Dan Willis, from the previous video, also presents the concept of flexibility as being crucial to successful web design.  Both lectures sited Amazon.com as an example of this type of design flexibility.  Apparently, Amazon.com is known for trying new things out live on their site, tracking customer traffic within these changes, and then modifying the site architecture upon the results of their experimentation.

Taking the ideas from the previous two videos into account, I now turn the discussion to a more personal perspective.  Currently, I am experimenting with free online software and web-hosting sources as I develop a personal web site and begin to maintain a broader online presence.

As a visual artist my eye is drawn to the dramatic.  Thus, if you are not aware of Jim Carrey's Official website please explore the link below. 

Jim Carrey's Official Web Site

This site is visually awesome though lacks proficient navigation.  It is also heavily based in Flash animation which hinders the site's upload and navigation time.  I suggest that Jim Carrey's official web site is an example of  experience over accessibility.  So much time, energy, and money went in to this site's development and though one could argue the sites validity based solely on it's aesthetics, that argument becomes stale after a few visits to the site.  Yes, Jim Carrey's Official website is stunning, but that is all.  Accessing information other than visual stimulation from this site is extreme in it's difficulties.  I am inspired by Carrey's site but certainly want to explore interesting visual aesthetics while maintaining functionality.

This brings us to my first attempt at creating a personal website.  Due to my considerable lack of HTML coding knowledge, I am playing with and exploring some of the net's many free web hosting and free site developent tools.  These sites are dubbed WYSIWYG's, or "what you see is what you get".  My initial intentions were to begin my personal web site's development with a WYSIWYG template application through Wordpress.com.  Their web building tools and hosting capabilities seem to offer a vast array of interfaces with a bevy of creative visual abilities balanced with high functionality.  I did play around on Wordpress.com quite a bit, but found my incredible lack of web design experience frustrating my attempts.  A time constant was placed on this project and I was feeling the crunch.  I needed to get some concrete design advancements underway on this project, therefore I decided to work with a simpler web development platform called Weebly.com.

This is a screen shot of my first personal website built using Weebly's free web-hosting and site-development tools.  Explore the link below to further understand Weebly's simplistic functionality.

My first personal website built using Weebly.com

I spent allot of time playing with the design of this site.  I felt that the clean simplistic approach would accomplish my goals most appropriately.  It was very easy to begin designing and working with the tools that Weebly provides.  I feel that it is Weebly's simplicity that afforded me success with this project.  I intend to maintain this site and blog, adding new content to the site as I learn other tools and avenues for web development and design.  Getting your feet wet is sometimes the most crucial step towards success.  With this simple site I have begun the process of broadening  my personal web related design and implementation skills.

Finally I wish to discuss an inspiring Flash based web design and hosting platform called Wix.com.  A friend randomly turned me on to this site about the same time I had completed the majority of work designing and developing my Weebly site.  I played around with the free development tools on Wix and within twenty minutes I had created a visually interesting animated web page which included a theme song that plays on a loop.  Now I am excited!  Explore the link below to grasp an idea why I am so inspired by this type of web development free-ware.

Web page built at Wix.com

Using the web development tools at Wix reminded me of Adobe Dreamweaver.  I am not a master of Dreamweaver but I get the gist of the program.  Wix has utilized much of the same functionality that Dreamweaver offers but within a more simplistic approach.  There are several font styles, placement positioning, animations, and effects that can be added to each new element designed into the page.  Several multi-media widgets are available for use as well as a means to create original widgets.  The interface is easy enough for me to grasp and challenging enough to draw me back to see what I can do next.  I intend to explore Wix's Flash based site development tools to their fullest by creating new and unique pages visually based on collage techniques I have utilized in my past artwork.  The twist here will be that each of the collage I can treat as a linkable object, thus on one page creating an aesthetic portal of information for an audience member.  This is still a work in progress and often designed solutions change and morph.  Stay tuned for further updates and links on my continuing design progress.