Ashish's 8 Principles for Good Web Design

So today I've put together my 9 principles for good web design, it's only my opinions and I've tried to link off to more reading on subjects so you don't only hear my voice. Obviously I have lots of disclaimers, rules are made to be broken, different types of design work differently! 1. Precedence (Guiding the Eye) Good web design, perhaps even more than other type of design, is about information. One of the biggest tools in your arsenal to do this is precedence. When using a good design, the user should be led around the screen by the designer. I call this precedence and it's about how much visual weight different parts of your design have. A simple example of precedence is that in most sites the first thing you see is the logo. This is often because it’s large and set at what has been shown in studies to be the first place people look (the top left). This is a good thing since you probably want a user to immediately know what site they are viewing. But precedence should go much further. You should direct the user’s eyes through a sequence of steps. For example you might want your user to go from logo/brand to a primary positioning statement to punchy image to give the site personality to main body text, with navigation and a side bar taking a secondary position in the sequence. What your user should be looking at is up to you, the web designer, to figure out. To achieve precedence you have many tools at your disposal: Position - Where something is on a page clearly influences in what order the user sees it Colour – Using bold and subtle colours is a simple way to tell your user where to look Contrast – Being different makes things stand out, being the same makes them secondary. Size – Big takes precedence over little (unless everything is big, in which case little might stand out thanks to Contrast) Design Elements – if there is a gigantic arrow pointing at something, guess where the user will look? 2. Spacing When I first started designing I wanted to fill every available space up with stuff. Empty space seemed wasteful. In fact the opposite is true. Spacing makes things clearer. In web design there are three aspects of space that you should be considering: Line Spacing When you lay text out the space between the lines directly affects how readable it appears. Too little space makes it easy for your eye to spill over from one line to the next, too much space means that when you finish one line of text and go to the next your eye can get lost. So you need to find a happy medium. You can control line spacing in CSS with the 'line-height' selector. Generally I find the default value is usually too little spacing. Line Spacing is technically called leading (pronounced ledding) from the process that printers used to use to separate lines of text in ye olde days - by placing bars of lead between the lines. Padding Generally speaking text should never touch other elements. Images for example should not be touching text, neither should borders or tables. Padding is the space between elements and text. The simple rule here is that you should always have space there. There are exceptions of course, in particular if the text is some sort of heading/graphic or your name is David Carson :-) But as a general rule, putting space between text and the rest of the world makes it infinitely more readable and pleasant. White Space First of all, white space doesn't need to be white. The term simply refers to empty space on a page (or negative space as it's sometimes called). White space is used to give balance, proportion and contrast to a page. A lot of white space tends to make things seem more elegant and upmarket, so for example if you go to an expensive architect site you'll almost always see a lot of space. If you want to learn to use whitespace effectively, go through a magazine and look at how adverts are laid out. Ads for big brands of watches and cars and the like tend to have a lot of empty space used as an element of design. 3. Navigation One of the most frustrating experiences you can have on a website is being unable to figure out where to go or where you are. I'd like to think that for most web designers navigation is a concept we've managed to master, but I still find some pretty bad examples out there. There are two aspects of navigation to keep in mind: Navigation - Where can you go? There are a few common sense rules to remember here. Buttons to travel around a site should be easy to find - towards the top of the page, easy to identify - they should look like navigation buttons, and well described - the text of a button should be pretty clear as to where it's taking you. Aside from the common sense, it's also important to make navigation usable. For example if you have a rollover submenu, ensuring a person can get to the submenu items without losing the rollover is important. Similarly changing the colour or image on rollover is excellent feedback for a user. Orientation - Where are you now? There are lots of ways you can orient a user so there is no excuse not to. In small sites it might be just a matter of a big heading or a 'down' version of the appropriate button in your menu. In a larger site you might make use of bread crumb trails, sub headings and a sitemap for the truly lost. 4. Design to Build Life has gotten a lot easier since web designers transitioned to CSS layouts, but even now it's still important to think about how you are going to build a site when you're still in Photoshop. Consider things like: Can it actually be done? You might have picked an amazing font for your body copy, but is it actually a standard HTML font? You might have a design that looks beautiful but is 1100px wide and will result in a horizontal scroller for the majority of users. It's really good to know what can and can't be done, which is why I believe all web designers should also build sites, at least sometimes. What happens when a screen is resizes? Do you need repeating backgrounds, how will they work? Is the design centred or left aligned? Are you doing anything which is technically difficult? Even with CSS positioning, some things like vertical alignment are still a bit painful and sometimes best avoided. Could small changes in your design greatly simplify how you build it? Sometimes moving an object around in a design can make a big difference in how you have to code your CSS later. In particular when elements of a design cross over each other it adds a little complexity to the build. So if your design has say three elements and each element is completely separate from each other, it would be really easy to build. On the other hand if all three overlap each other, it might still be easy, but will probably be a bit more complicated. You should find a balance between what looks good and small changes that can simplify your build For large sites particularly, can you simplify things? There was a time when I used to make image buttons for my sites. So if there was a download button for example I would make a little download image. In the last year or so I've switched to using CSS to make my buttons and have never looked back. Sure it means my buttons don't always have the flexibility I might wish for, but the savings in build time from not having to make dozens of little button images are huge. For More mail me at: ashish4niks@rediffmail.com