Misbegotten Rules of Web Designhttp://www.enosis.com/resources/misbegot.html Nick Ragouzis, Enosis Group, February, 1997
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In our concern to help amateur designers to avoid making the worst web design mistakes, we forge and promulgate a body of rules--those familiar lists of Dos and Don'ts that we find in countless texts on "good" web design. Experienced designers have no use for these injunctions. But irrelevance to design practice is not the worst of it. Rule-making for web design is insidious. It encourages the notion that one can do an acceptable design without wrestling with the difficult questions raised by the total context in which a site exists. Judging sites by our rules is to participate in the same mystification. If we, who throw ourselves up as experts, are truly concerned with the quality of web design, then we should judge sites by the principles that experienced designers use. And if we are really concerned with educating amateur designers to do good design on the web, then we should teach them design...not give them lists of silly rules. |