Comments on: 99% of Web Design Books are Not

By: Fine art paintings

Fine art paintings — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 09:59:29 +0000

If this is the true essence of Web Design, how can we educate most web designers and/or graphics designers about this? Indeed, things shouldn’t be accomplished in the technical ways most of the time. You see, most web designers nowadays are required to be masters of CSS, HTML, and all. In fact most web designing jobs require the expertise on these applications. If true web design isn’t about these applications, why is it then that these are the primary requirement job-wise?

By: Dale Cruse

Dale Cruse — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 16:50:00 +0000

This isn’t the first time I’ve heard an IA/usability type poo poo other web disciplines. I’m curious why that is.

By: CHRIS

CHRIS — Sun, 16 Sep 2007 16:13:22 +0000

There was one time when webdesign was easy …
You did the creation in Photoshop or Illustrator and click export as html ….
Then in Dreamweaver you just had to center the whole design or best put in a table with an austostretching colum for some semi-liquid design ….
If you didn’t need to be so graphic and weren’t disturbed by a fixed design in a world of bigger and bigger screens, you could also design with layers directly in Dreamweaver …
Then came the headache of the CSS layout (for the purely graphic oriented mind we mean) and all this hacks esoterica requiring books and more books to explain how to eventually get this middle-of-the-road look that most standard compliant sites share together …
So what id needed is now that Adobe is owning both Photoshop and Dreamweaver, that they come again with a conversion tool that takes your design in Photoshop and convert it into the equivalent CSS box model, with a couple of radio buttons to check :
- Do you want a fixed layout with layers (only current option of Adobe CS2) or liquid or semi-liquid ?
- Do you want this column to stretch ?
- Do you want the content to adjust or to overlap in case the size of the text is increased by the browser ?
- Should this background be printed too and if not what colour would you like to have for the text in the automatically generated CSS print style sheet ?
- and so on …

Or as well in Dreamweaver make it as easy to generate the “float design” you want, as it was for tables with the deprecated “advanced layout mode”, or as it is easy to get a fixed compliant layout with the absolute positionning of the “layers” (simply drawing squares on your screen, yes siree) …

Then all those books won’t be necessary anymore …
Like, at one point Dave Siegel had to spend time explaining the use of the non-breaking space or the transparent gif etc … which seemed at the time a total aberration for the designer coming from the print and was quite a headache to implement, until the first version of DW and Image Ready came and make this invisible for the designer … By the way did you notice, that even in its latest versions, Dreamweaver is still using those same spacer.gif and nbsp; in the code it creates ..?? I mean Dreamweaver, Adobe, the ones shaping the future of the web in many ways …

The “good” thing is that the law of computers is such that when one difficult thing becomes easy, two that were impossible to do become very difficult to perform …
So, those book writers won’t be on the dole either and the pure designers will be happy - for some times…

So please Adobe make a move (maybe it is done already with CS3, but we didn’t hear the news so far …)

By: toys

toys — Mon, 30 Jul 2007 22:49:27 +0000

I know exactly what you mean. I have shown up for three jobs in the past to be a web designer and then been told that what I would be doing is coding the pages and the graphic designer would be designing the pages. Not that I can’t write code, but when I see the words web designer, I think of the design not the coding…for that I look for “web coder” or something like that. Although I have to disagree about the books. Don’t you find that your style and what you understand differs remarkably from some of the other people around you? I know that my style of learning just doesn’t fit in with Eric Meyer and I need someone else to teach me with book smarts how to do things. Not that he isn’t good. He’s excellent, but I’m a different kind of learner. Where do you find books when you go to Barnes and Noble? I usually end up in the Graphic Design section and it makes me feel a little weird because I’m a web designer. Do you think it is even possible at this point to make the transition to having people understand the difference? Or are we simply stuck as we are? Lumped in with coders under one name?

By: Delta

Delta — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 00:00:07 +0000

I’ve always considered “web design books” to be useless. I use Frontpage, and my code may be bloated and awful looking, but it doesn’t effect page function or SEO so I’ll stick to what I know (tables galore). Every time I go into Barnes and Nobles I look at their web design section, and most of what I see doesn’t seem helpful. If you use Frontpage as a WYSIWYG program, you don’t really need to have an in depth knowledge of coding unless you’re trying to pull something complicated off. I remember studying books on Photoshop and Frontpage for months, and learning more in a few weeks of working at a firm than I had trying to educate myself with literature. A book isn’t going to teach you how to develop an aesthetically pleasing site, I think it boils down to working with others, learning what’s effective, and then developing your own ideas from there.

By: Onlineshop

Onlineshop — Sat, 10 Mar 2007 03:28:36 +0000

I think these blog is really useful for new comers and Excellent resource list.

By: Delta

Delta — Sat, 23 Dec 2006 00:29:06 +0000

I’m hardly a coding purist as I do everything in Frontpage’s WYSIWYG formatting. Anyone reading those books on design at B&N won’t have bloated code, and can score points for accessibility, but I haven’t seen any sites not getting indexed despite sloppy coding. My coding is the equivalent of using duct tape to hold a car together, but it serves its purpose. In the end, a lot of clients aren’t going to be concerned with everything those books teach. If the site is attractive, if it loads relatively fast and still ranks well, then perfect.

By: Sjors Timmer - blog - » Design versus development

Sjors Timmer - blog - » Design versus development — Sat, 11 Nov 2006 13:47:40 +0000

[...] Yesterday I came across this post on Bokardo, where he writes about why most webdesign books are more about development than on design Part of the problem is that HTML and CSS ain’t easy. No matter what people tell you, the CSS layout scheme is not for the faint of heart. [...]

By: Daus

Daus — Sat, 07 Oct 2006 07:38:27 +0000

Interesting

By: momof2

momof2 — Mon, 02 Oct 2006 15:15:24 +0000

I am very glad you bring this topic up. I am a Desinger who does web design and also some print design. Lately I have been wondering about where to draw the line when it comes to writing the code. I write my own HTML and CSS but lately there seems to be a demad of doing some JSP from me as well. I mean, I alot more time to do the technical part then the Design. We work in deadline driven environment and it is very hard to get both going at a good pace.

Recently I was looking at the resume for a Web Desinger and I noticed that there is lot more emphasis on techology than on the actual design skills. I mean come on you want us to do design and part of back end promgramming. It’s not like the pay has gone up that much either. Basically you are required to know Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, Flash, Go Live, HTML, Xhtml, CSS, PHP, DHTML, Javascript, Ajax and be an exceptional designer and get paid $25.00/hr.

So that brings back to my question, where do you draw the line? I have on many occasion thought about going technical and learch some languages, but my passion is design and I keep coming back to it.

By: links for 2006-09-29 (Leapfroglog)

links for 2006-09-29 (Leapfroglog) — Fri, 29 Sep 2006 06:21:44 +0000

[...] Bokardo - Social Web Design » 99% of Web Design Books are Not Joshua Porter points out that a lot of stuff that’s known under the name of web design is actually more like web development. Designing for the web should be about designing for end-users not (like development) about solving technical problems. (tags: design webdesign development webdevelopment web JoshuaPorter webdev) [...]

By: 绝缘电阻测试仪

绝缘电阻测试仪 — Mon, 18 Sep 2006 04:25:39 +0000

楼主说的确实对我很有用,多谢了!@_@~~

By: JJ

JJ — Thu, 14 Sep 2006 13:43:49 +0000

Whew, indeed, it’s about time someone actually wrote this in any sort of a published piece!!

While I’ve been saying it personally for years, job listings continue to list designer as being someone who’s fluent in not only html and css but they love to add in there xml, php, ajax (if they’ve heard it mentioned somewhere), cgi, etc.

Only in my first Web [design] job, way back in 1998 was I deigned the luxury of working with a development team to translate designs. Now it’s all up to me, and frankly, I’m really sick of it, judging that about 75% of my tasks each day are fixing folks’ code they get from, say, Word, guessing, et al.

A little bit true, now, is that I do understand some of what you can and are less able to present, though, after vast experimentation, I find that most IS able to happen, with more and less success across browsers, +/- useability, download times, etc, to any design you might want to implement.

I think that the design+development corner has been turned by every place, and that there’s no going back. Design, always a last-minute thought for content developers, are now throwing in even more stress-inducement for designers, requiring the most difficult part, development, to be the “designer” task as well. In my experience anyway…. My title shouldn’t even be design, it’s more like content-”code”-repairman, most frequently anyway. Until they want something really “Flashy,” that is … but don’t even get me started on Flash!

By: milo

milo — Wed, 13 Sep 2006 15:42:41 +0000

Excellent!

By: Pauric

Pauric — Tue, 12 Sep 2006 16:06:20 +0000

Ray, from your blog “Monday, March 14, 2005
Content of New Media is Old Media

I’ve always been attracted to McLuhan’s concept that “the content of new media is old media.”

Can you resolve that with your statement here “Interface is content.”

Btw, I’m not trying to catch you out (o; I wont pretend to have any education in this area, just very interested and would like to understand more, thanks