Today in class I will be talking about both planning your site and introduce page layout.
Charley Parker has published a series on How to Display Your Art on the Web in 6 parts. It is aimed at illustrators, gallery artists, cartoonists, comics artists, concept artists and other visual artists who want to present online in a professional manner. The coverage is thorough, well written, and easily understood. Start off with How not to display your art work on the web and pay attention to Planning your web site.
Who are you designing for?
It is crucial to ask who you are creating a website for. In How To Create Pen Portraits and Understand Your Target Audience Chris Garrett discusses pen portraits as a way to visualise who your website is for.
How do we know how people see a site? You will read many designer say this or that works. Their statements are usually based on research. For instance one way we know how users make sense of what they see on screen is through eye tracking. What is eye tracking? This video explains it.
Studies at the Poynter Institute, Stanford University use eye tracking equipment to track and record the way online readers’ eyes scan news websites. They analyse the way people pause on areas of the screen in order to absorb information.
Steve Outing and Laura Ruel report the most common eye-movement patterns discovered What We Saw When We Looked Through Their Eyes . Their diagrams reveal on screen zones that are more important than others. See Eyetracking points the way to effective news article design
What not to do when designing a site is highlighted in Amateur Web Sites - the Top Ten Signs. Charlie Morris points to busy backgrounds, badly designed navigation, using frames, a table based look, hit counters, “under construction signs”, endorsements to use a particular browser, cluttered pages containing free adds are all tell tale signs
Think about How people really use web pages which comes from a series of articles web design from scratch. Each article covers a key point such as how people use web pages, how they scan a page, how impatient people are, keeping it simple, communicating rather than decorating, and conventions in web design.
Heidi Adkisson’s Web Design Practices has good information and research mainly about navigation best practice.
Smashing Magazine has produced a list of 10 Principles of Effective Web Design
Whitespace by Mark Boulton
Jason Beaird has written The Principles of Beautiful Web Design for Sitepoint. The article is an excerpt from the book of the same name.
Kyle Meyer has published The Elements of Design Applied to the Web which is an excellent summery of the basics of design. Kyle Meyer applies the elements of balance, proportion, rhythm, emphasis, and unity to web page layout and illustrates these key elements with screen shots of good examples where these principals are applied expertly.
Patrick McNeil regularly reviews well designed websites on Design Meltdown. In his Designer Portfolios part 6 Patrick reviews and illustrates with thumbnail screenshots 10 portfolio sites that keep it simple and to the point.
Lorelle VanFossen has written a about the experience of designing a website for artists, musicians, painters, poets, or crafters in The Art of the Artist Web Design Collaboration as she teases out what issues are important to make a site work.
