A web page has a purpose – the aesthetics & looks of this is only a tiny part of the big picture.

Design without purpose is art.

(I loathe Adobe products. Corel does it just as nice, and way faster for me.)

Content with Style applied.

“I prefer to use the proper term which is style. Site styles or themes/skins are interchangeable. And they need to be applied to one or more pages of content. That content may be in one or more templates or layouts. And those layouts may also change or develop over time to reflect growing/evolving or additional content.”

Then today I saw this job posting from 37signals soliciting job applications for a new role created on their team. Please read below:

We’re looking for a special designer who wants to come in and change our game. We’re looking to be reinvented visually.

The job would include completely redesigning our public facing marketing sites and being in charge of constantly evolving that public image. Help us better communicate the benefits of

our products. Think simple, but also think visual beauty. More imagery, more graphical, less plain text.

In many ways this is a creative/art director role, but also a “you’ll do the work too” role. So whatever you dream up you’ll also be designing and executing. It’s a high profile position for us with lots of influence across our company and the industry.

More imagery, more graphical, less plain text.

love that :)

(Ah, the ‘T’ word again)

Information architecture, for me, normally begins as a series of lists in a sketchbook, before moving to something like Omni Outliner; wireframes start the same way (sketchbook), generally progressing to something like Omni Graffle. All this is design work; it’s not graphic design, certainly, but it’s vital preparatory design. By the time I get to the xhtml that prep work means that I have the site’s IA skeleton firmly in mind and the code will better for it. It also means that when I step into photoshop I’ll be fully aware of what jobs those graphics should be doing.

My point (and I’m starting to ramble a bit, so I’ll shut up in a sec) is that design for the web comes in many forms, even within a single project. IA is one form of design. Graphics is another. These are skills that come from different directions but meet and need to complement each other.*

I see IA/wireframing as the prep work for (x)html, and graphics work as the prep work for CSS. Each provides an invaluable blueprint for the next stage. Yes, you can probably save yourself some time by skipping some of the design work before you jump into implementation, but I think that it will come at the expense of something… probably either information clarity or visual elegance.

*I’d certainly argue that the former is more important than the later—but the latter, if done well, can sometimes help overcome the failings of the former).

To add to that. I think alot of developers/coders/designers including me at times, make the mistake of using the production tool (Photoshop,CSS,XHTML,etc) as the main, if not, the only place where the concept is visualized.

This leads to a lot of wasted cycles in the design process. I think we should focus more on sketching with simple paper and pencil BEFORE we sat in front of the computer, or before we run to the myriad of web inspiration sites.

Seriously thinking through what we want to communicate/sell for ourselves or our clients using trusty “analog” paper would greatly reduce the time we spent futzing with our mice. I don’t know, just a thought.

There’s a whole design process that should take place before you even think about jumping into the CSS.

How do you think sites like Web Designer Wall or the shiny ‘Web 2.0’ stuff came about?  That’s all Photoshop’s influence.