Jeff Bridgforth :: Webcraftsman

Learning the Fundamentals of Design

March 25, 2008

Design (Web)

One of my inter­ests of late has been to learn the fun­da­men­tals of design. I was really chal­lenged by this after doing an all day sem­i­nar with Luke W at UI12 in Novem­ber. Here are some of the resources that have been help­ful to me:

• Site See­ing — Luke W’s book that cov­ers much of the con­tent of the one day sem­i­nar I attended. One of the things I got out of it was think­ing about hier­ar­chy on a page. Think­ing through the hier­ar­chy of con­tent and then com­ing up with a visual orga­ni­za­tion on the page to sup­port that mes­sage. I also liked the idea of think­ing of design in terms of visual orga­ni­za­tion and per­son­al­ity (often what we call look and feel). I have been chal­lenged to con­sider visual orga­ni­za­tion first and then to come up with a per­son­al­ity for the site that enhances that orga­ni­za­tion and the mes­sage that site is try­ing to communicate.
• Prin­ci­ples of Design series on Design Melt­down — I liked the use of exam­ples from other Web sites that sup­ported the prin­ci­ples dis­cussed in these articles.
• Explor­ing the Ele­ments of Design — I saw this in a Border’s book­store in Boston while attend­ing UI12. I have enjoyed going through this book. It is filled with lots of exam­ples mostly from the graphic design realm.
• Uni­ver­sal Prin­ci­ples of Design — This is a book that Andy Rut­ledge sug­gested to me. I am look­ing for­ward to read­ing it. It con­tains short chap­ters on dif­fer­ent design such as 80/20 rule, Fitt’s Law and Guten­berg Diagram.
• Prin­ci­ples of Design, Ele­ments of Design, Design­ing for the Web, and The Prin­ci­ples and Ele­ments of Design arti­cles on Dig­i­tal Web — good primer arti­cles to get famil­iar with the prin­ci­ples and ele­ments of design. This was the arti­cle that I first read and then wanted to go deeper.
• Con­trast and Mean­ing — Arti­cle by Andy Rutledge