As of tonight, I decided to discontinue pursuing future projects in the area of traditional HTML/CSS design. This is partly based on my mounting frustrations with the CSS standard, that despite being explicitly defined by the W3C, has never been fully and properly implemented by any browser. Every designer instinct tells me that CSS is necessary and not to use table designs, but recently I’ve found it increasingly hard to rationalize this as a benefit against productivity.

As far as I’m concerned, technology should be an aid in my pursuit of the holy grail of Design. If the technology is too old, or just not up to par with my needs and expectations, than I have no other recourse but to pursue other technology that lets me do what I want consistently and with the relative ease I expect. To this end, I have recently put much time into developing with Flex, and in the future plan on working with Silverlight (as much of an Adobe fan as I am, I’d be a fool not to learn more about the competition, for more info, see Blue Ray). I like pushing the edge, and to me, CSS feels like a hack to make HTML, nearly a 30-year old technology, look decent. Ditto on JavaScript in terms of AJAX (that aside, I love what JavaScript is, just not how it is used).
Another factor in this decision is a shift in career focus for me. While I intend on continuing my design skills, I find myself enjoying application programming more and more each day. I find myself more challenged with this, but challenged in a good way.

I find it so much more rewarding not to be fighting the technology, but instead fighting against my own lack of knowledge as I push myself into these areas of programming that are, at least to me, new. I don’t feel like I’m giving up on HTML/CSS. In fact if anything, I consider my journey through HTML/CSS based design complete. It’s been a mix of good and bad, but what I take from it are the lessons and the experience.

So here I am, feeling at a crossroads of sorts. While I find comfort in what I’ve learned, I feel the urge to push forward, and while my past and the present is important, in many ways they both hold me back.

Now all along you’ve probably been wondering about that little picture up there. It’s for the analogy I’m about to give you: Living as a developer/web designer is much like swinging along on monkey bars. You want to keep moving because if you stop too long on one rung, you lose your momentum, you risk losing your grip, and even if you want to start moving again, it’s not that easy.

RIP, HTML/CSS
2002-2008

I got a little email in my inbox the other day that frankly, surprised, irked, and amused me simultaneously. The email was from CSSFlash telling me that my site had been added successfully to their gallery. This puzzled me for a few minutes until after looking at their site I was able to vaguely remember submitting this site about 3 months ago! Now, I can understand that for a site that updates every 90 minutes with new CSS sites that they have to be about as loaded down with add requests as can be. So I figure OK, they were very busy, didn’t have until now to get to me.

Not quite true. Apparently CSSFlash simply took a screenshot of this site 2-3 months ago, queued it up, and it took until now for it to appear on the front page. I’m happy I was accepted to a CSS design site. But I redesigned this site back in November! And frankly, the design back then wasn’t that great. So now my opportunity for some free traffic is for nil.

But wait! The email they sent me said I should simply email them back if there were any problems! So I did. I even gave them the courtesy of taking a screenshot myself for them to use. No response. Thumbnail on their site hasn’t changed either. Much annoyance on my end.

I would have just hoped, that for a site like that they would be serious enough about it to have some quality control over what comes out. All it would have taken would be to click on the link to see something wasn’t right…

Update: As of 2/23/08, I have received no response nor has the image been updated. Seems the owners of CSSFlash have all but abandoned any responsiveness to their emails.

Here is my new business card design. I have been carrying around ones for far too long with old information on them and it was about time that I created a new one that reflects my current line of business. It is based on the site’s design and color theme and was partly the reason for the design tweaks I made the other day as I link the background with a pattern much better. I have sent these off to the printers and should have them within a week. I will post pictures when they arrive.

The title of this post is graffiti from the game Bioshock. As an avid gamer, I enjoy the subtle details that their creators place in the game and this is one that I think all designers take to heart. In essence this post boils down to examining the ethics of the aesthetic decisions we make.

Wikipedia defines moral imperative:

“a principle originating inside a person’s mind that compels that person to act.”

This means we do things automatically, as a mental instinct. Instinct has its benefits, one is that we do these things subconsciously. However, instinct can sometimes become out of control, or worse, be ignored because it is instinct. Should not aesthetics be the first instinct a designer has?

Aesthetics are key, without them our designs would be loathed or avoided. So why do we as designers make our aesthetic decisions? I have seen many designs pass where the designer had free reign yet aesthetics have been completely ignoring for the sake of visual experimentation or lack of experience. Certainly visual experimentation cannot be faulted nor lack of experience, however we as designers have an ethical obligation to anyone who would encounter our products to make them aesthetically pleasing.

What happens when someone sees something that is hard on the eyes, difficult to read, or otherwise not pleasant? They leave. Plain and simple. The person simply should not have to put any additional effort into dissecting a design to make sense of it. Not only are we doing them a disservice by implementing designs that fall short of acceptable, but we do a disservice to ourselves and indeed our industry in the process.

Aesthetics are also not merely picking colors that work well together. Ok, so you’ve mastered the color wheel, but have you thought about composition? Composition is a complex topic (perhaps for a later post) and there are aesthetics in composition as well. Having your design crammed so tightly into its space makes the elements blur together and has a similar effect to mixing all the colors together.

In summary, take some time at every state of your design and remind yourself that aesthetics are a moral imperative. Am I really making every aspect of design work together aesthetically? Does the composition make certain colors dominate too much? Is asymmetry making my design too unbalanced?

It’s not all about pumping out pixels en masse, every pixel should be a masterpiece in the collection.