My Design Philosophy

My background is in engineering, not graphic design. This greatly influences my design philosophy and gives me a different set of priorities than mainstream, professional designers.

Accessibility

My view of accessibility can be summed up as: a Web site should be usable regardless of what hardware or software the user employs. Look at it this way: if you were running a business, and realized most customers arrive by car, would it make sense to tear out the sidewalk in front of your establishment? Many commercial Web sites make the equivalent mistake by requiring Flash, ActiveX, or similar non-standard software. They cater to the majority, but alienate the minority.

My handheld computer doesn't run Flash. My GNU/Linux PC can't run ActiveX (and I wouldn't want it to). An acquaintance of mine is blind: his special audio browser reads plain HTML pretty well, but it can't help him with all-Flash sites like Pepsi.com. I expect handheld computers, smart phones, and emerging devices like car computers to become ever more commonplace. Graphic design that works for a PC may not work well on the small screen of a telephone, and is meaningless to an audio browser (such as might be used on a car PC). Don't people who rely on these devices deserve to use your site?

Open Standards

There are a number of ways to achieve accessibility: some are better than others. You may have seen Flash-based Web sites that offer an alternate, non-Flash version of the same content. This is one approach to accessibility, but it places an unreasonable burden on the site's designer. The cost and effort involved are rarely justifiable.

Open standards are a way out of that trap. If a designer takes care to use open standards, then any standards-compliant browser should display the page just fine. This shifts the burden of accessibility back toward the user (or more precisely, the developer of the user's software). It forges an implicit contract: as long as the user has a standards-compliant computer (regardless of its size, type, or operating system), a standards-compliant site will be intelligible to him or her.

One could argue that de facto standards like Flash or ActiveX form the same sort of contract. The problem is that de facto standards are not necessarily open. Proprietary software, however commonplace, is available only from a single vendor. If that vendor goes out of business, decides to start charging unreasonable prices, or simply chooses to stop making the software work on "outdated" computers, users have no recourse. On the other hand, open standards (available to all software developers without cost or license) mean that it will always be theoretically possible for anyone to create software that supports the standard.

Simplicity

A picture may be worth a thousand words, but a thousand words downloads faster.

To assume that all users have high-speed Internet access violates the principle of accessibility. A well-designed site should not gratuitously consume bandwidth and slow the user's browsing to a crawl.

From the point of view of visual design, I believe that a Web site should be straightforward and visually uncluttered. Users turn to the Web because they want information quickly. A confusing layout crowded with lots of advertising and extraneous links is a good way to lose their interest. Well-chosen graphics have their place, but I believe most commercial sites are visually over-designed and that their usability suffers as a result.

Dynamic Layout

My concern for accessibility, open standards, and simplicity has one main practical consequence: I must rely on the user's browser to present my site in a meaningful, appealing way. For instance, I can't use a fixed-width menu bar because I don't know how wide the user's screen will be: twenty inches, or three inches? If I want a three-column layout, I'll need to experiment with how that looks on small screens or text-only browsers, and design the page so it still makes sense when displayed in text mode (for example). This is something I'm learning about as I go, and in the future I'll add some of my ideas to this page.

Design Links

In the future I'll have some links here to sites about Web design.

Design of this Page

This site is designed entirely using standards-compliant HTML (specifically, XHTML 1.1), using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) for layout.

In the future, I'll give the technical details of the few design tricks I use, like the menu bar at the top of the page.