“Design†Archive
When Guidelines Should Be Descriptive or Prescriptive
Every time I’m setting up guidelines and standards, mostly within companies, one of the questions I need to ask and answer myself is whether or not they, or which parts of them, should be descriptive or prescriptive. For coding guidelines this would mean the difference between …
Updating a Definition of Art
When I once tried to define art, design, and decoration, I described art as: “Art hides. Art has a meaning, and it hides it, on purpose. Art delivers a message, and it’s hidden, on purpose. It is an art to create art. Art is unusable, by definition.†Several months and discussions later …
Compared to What?
… is probably one of the most important questions there is. “Compared to what?†is the question that should be answered everytime it is about data, be it presented in graphs, in newspapers, on websites, or when just talked about. Yet it is rarely answered, rarely asked, …
10 Measures for Continuous Website Maintenance
Website maintenance and quality assurance mean the backbone of high quality offers of information, and they represent the difference between an amateurish or professional approach to web design and development. Consequently, guidelines for quality web design define maintenance …
Web Design: 10 Additional Research Findings You Should Know
Following up on last year’s post on web design research, here’s a new collection of research results, this time featuring further reading as well. It happens that I still watch the work of Association for Computing Machinery, Human Factors International, and the like …
Less Is Still More
How much time and money gets spent on making things worse is something I find absolutely fascinating. Allow me to elaborate, starting with HTML newsletters: People (let) spend hours on writing supposed content, create and decorate mockups, work around ridiculous email client implementations, …
Website Optimization Measures, Part IV
Once again, though already covering a few weeks of various improvements. Some have been taken place in Bremen, others in Zurich, all on one or more of my sites. Anyway, enjoy some additional tips, this time roughly touching typography, usability, SEO, and web development with performance focus …
Standardistas, Help Fix Wikipedia
When it comes to professional web design and web development, not only the English Wikipedia is in questionable condition. And considering the value Wikipedia has as a contact point for rubbernecks and novices, it should be in our best interest to take care of …
The 10 Design Theses of Dieter Rams
Moving up industrial design on my agenda and studying the work of German top designer Dieter Rams, who was responsible for the mostly great design of Braun products for about 30 years, I considered it to be useful to bring up his design theses again …
Website Optimization Measures, Part III
Jens on quality assurance again, this week featuring the link richness challenge, updated ping service lists, improved WordPress plugins and security, revised layout grids, font karaoke, and more prominent update information. Hot and spicy as always.
