Grids, Type, & the Web
There’s a big trend in modern web design that’s gotten stuck on some Web 2.0 poster children—rounded corners, shiny surfaces, semi-industrial texture. Personally, I’m not much of a fan—it’s all become so cloyingly similar and offers only a patina of real usability and falls far short of great design. My favorite web designers use classic design principles (take this with a grain of salt, I read things like 500 Years of Book Design for fun) and use proportion and type choices as their main tools—anyone interested in web products would be well served to at least understand that style of design, and I can’t recommend more interesting reference sources than Mark Boulton’s book, Designing for the Web, and Khoi Vinh’s recent write-up of how he designed a WordPress theme, Really Basic Maths.
Developing products is like developing software: it’s a lot easier if you can agree to a basic framework. Having a framework and vocabulary for your design makes it even easier.
