Last month, 37signals published a short but sweet post about why web designers should do the HTML/CSS implementations for their own designs. The bottom line is, as we’ve all been saying for a long time now, that the Web is not the same kind of medium as other mediums like print. It is a fundamentally different kind of canvas than most web designers are used to using. As a result, if you as a web designer are not intimately familiar with it, you’re not going to do great work.
designing for the web is a lot less about making something dazzle and a lot more about making it work. The design decisions that matter pertain directly to the constraints of the materials. What form elements to use. What font sizes. What composition. What flow. Those decisions are poorly made at an arm’s length.
I’ve worked with many web designers in the past who only did abstractions and then handed over pictures to be chopped and implemented by “HTML monkeys”. It never really gelled well. The things that got strong attention were all the things that Photoshop did well. Imagery, curvy lines, and the frame. All the around stuff, never the it stuff.
In other words, to do great web design you have to design in the Web, not in some other medium for the Web. I mean, serious magazine firm employs designers who don’t understand how to work with page layout programs like InDesign. Why, then, do so many web design agencies employ designers who don’t know how to work with web technologies, or even how to use programs like Dreamweaver? It doesn’t really make any sense, and it’s no wonder that the resulting implementation is rarely top-notch work.
But if you’re a graphic designer who doesn’t know much about Web technologies, what are you to do? Well, as a first step, I think you should pick up my new book, Foundation Website Creation
. It’s available from all good booksellers (and probably some crappy ones) as of today. The book is targeted towards all manner of web professionals, including graphic designers and website producers, who want to learn more about what it takes to actually implement a site.
If I do say so myself, the chapters on XHTML and CSS are exceptionally thorough. The book doesn’t try to turn you into an exceptional programmer. Instead, it will explain the foundational concepts you need to know to understand how XHTML and CSS actually work, and in so doing will enable you to use the tools you already know to solve problems and get things done.
I think this book will be an excellent starting point for lots of designers and other web professionals. However, it is not going to take you from zero to hero—no book can. That’s why I recommend that, after you read Foundation Website Creation and have a solid grasp of what the technology can do for you and how it actually does it, you next take a look at these excellent books:
- DOM Scripting by Jeremy Keith — if you’re a designer that needs to add a behavioral layer with JavaScript and Ajax to your pages, you need to read this book next.
- Mastering CSS with Dreamweaver CS3 - if you’re familiar with Dreamweaver and want to keep using it to create standards-based web sites, then I recommend you follow Foundation Website Creation with this book by Stephanie Sullivan and Greg Rewis to take your Dreamweaver skills to the next level.
As always, most of all, have fun. Because if you’re not having fun, you’re not going to make good web sites no matter what you know.
Note: As of this writing, the book listing on Amazon still publishes the wrong author list, which is very frustrating but out of my hands. At least the image of our book’s front cover lists the correct authors.