Designing Attractive Web Pages
February 28, 1999
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A well-designed Web page is a thing of beauty. Your readers
may know nothing about fonts, leading, justification or kerning,
but can subconsciously sense when a page is well laid out.
Good design is practical as well as aesthetic - well-designed
pages are easier to read, and lead your readers' eyes where you
want them to be led. Although many of the rules that apply to
print pages don't apply on the Web, a good grounding in the
basic principles of design and typography is essential to a
Web page designer. Should Web sites always follow standard
design principles? By no means. However, you have to know the
rules before you can break 'em.
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A well-
designed
page, whether in print or on the Web, is a thing
of beauty. A skilled page designer can take widely differing
elements like
body
text,
headings,
graphics,
links and whatever,
and arrange them into a harmonious whole. Most readers know
nothing about fonts, leading, justification or kerning, but can
subconsciously sense when a page is well laid out, just as
people can perceive the difference between a good and a bad
photo or audio recording, without actually understanding the
technical issues that make it good or bad. Good design is
practical as well as aesthetic. Well-designed pages are easier
to read, and lead your readers' eyes where you want them to be
led.
In this article, we're looking strictly at the visual aspects
of page design. The practical aspects of organizing pages into
sites, and providing good
navigation
tools, were covered in a
previous article.
Nor shall we go very far into the technical
tricks involved in achieving various design effects. For that,
you'll want to consult an
HTML tutorial.
Let's get a couple of things straight right up front. First, the
concepts of "good design" and "bad design" exist only in the
eye of the beholder. Page
layout
is an art, and in the final
analysis, can't really be judged in objective terms. There is,
however, such a thing as generally accepted design, or
"standard" design principles, and that's what we're discussing
in this article. Should Web sites always follow standard
design principles? By no means. Look at Wired magazine for an
example of how to break every design rule in the book. Even
the paper it's printed on is a non-standard size. The question
to ask is, What effect are you trying to create? Solid and
dependable, or wild and crazy? Musicians call it "playing inside"
or "playing outside." To put it another way, you have to know
the rules before you can break 'em.
A second basic fact to keep in mind is that the Web is not print.
While many of the rules that apply to print pages also apply to
Web pages, there are some important differences. The main one,
of course, is that a Web designer can never be sure exactly how
the page is going to appear to the end user. The only thing you
can be sure of is that it will look different on different
systems. To attempt to get every element lined up perfectly,
as a print layout artist does, is to start down the path to
madness. Some misguided control freaks lay out whole pages as
graphics, not realizing that even this is no guarantee of
uniformity - some browsers won't display the colors correctly,
and some souls surf with images off.
Contents:
Good Page, Bad Page
Have Your Colors Done
Timeless Typography
It's Always Something
Good Page, Bad Page
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