mindgraffiti

With the next few posts I am going to show the thinking and decisions that go on behind the scenes in design work and what it is I do. If you find this information useful I hope you’ll pass it along.

I have noticed that many of my clients do not understand that design work has a purpose behind it. In fact, most of my family members and peers don’t understand the decisions made and the process behind a design, either. While anyone can identify a good design because “it looks pretty,” few can actually describe why those particular pieces in that order looks pretty.

Think of a web site as a road map, a ‘user’ as the driver, and the internet as the wide open highways. A good road map is easy to use. By looking at the colors, shapes, symbols and other graphics, you can figure out where you are and where you want to go. If you can’t figure out how to read it and use it, it ends up thrown in the trash. The same thing happens to a web site. When arriving at a web site, users immediately want these questions answered: Where am I? Why am I here? Where can I go?

If they cannot answer these three questions in the first few seconds of arriving, they will give up in frustration and hit the back button, never to return. Why visit again when it’s just frustrating?

It is my responsibility to build a good road map, using design elements (like shape, color, graphics, textures, fonts, etc.) to help answer these questions. While maps have common measurements and standards, making it easy for anyone to find their way and drive, the web is much more challenging to navigate. My job is to create a guide so users can reach their destination as quickly and easily as possible.

Just like the legend on a road map, there is an hierarchy to the pieces of information found on a page. The most important pieces of information are the ones that answer the basic questions quickly. This is why a good web site makes the answers easy to find:

1. the name of the company and/or their logo - “Where am I? I am at Company XYZ’s web site.”
2. the navigation - “Where can I go? I can browse through the scrapbook, apply for a job, or read more about their products.”
3. and the content - “Why am I here? So I can find out more about the history of Company XYZ.”

In the next post I’ll explain color - how it works on the web, the ‘psychology’ of color, and how colors are used as signals.

Related posts:

• The Purpose of Design - Color
• The Purpose of Design - Text
• CSS Workshop: My goal is to be able to build a viable, purely CSS template, unfettered by by dependencies of GoLive or Dreamweaver templates….