The Notebook

A Rant About Design

Design. Why is it important? Imagine this. You're going to use the public bathroom in Meijers, and your in need of some fast relief. So you move to the closest urinal and commence with nature, just as some kid desides to use the handicapped button to open the automatic door... which hapens to be placed right across from the urinal your using, which gives you a strait and true view into the store if you bother to look behind you. Unfortunately, the view goes both ways... and because the way the handicapped door was designed it give people in wheelchairs ample time to move through it. Roughly about 30 seconds. Just then a group of attractive members of the opposite sex move by the wide open door and commence in giggling. (This is a completely hypothetical situation, mind you...)

FACT: Bad Design can be a Tramatic experience!

Truth be told, there are thousands of people suffering from attacks of bad design right here on the web! It's true! Some people are very careless when design web-pages... and it's always the viewer that suffers. So brace yourself, friends, and pull out those hard hats... because we're going to give a few simple tips for some good design.

2. AVOID MORE THAN ONE POP-UP FRAME!
- I can't stress this enough! Sometimes even one pop-up is too much, but to sit there and have a frame pop-up every ten seconds is pure torture.

3. If you don't feel right about it, your audience won't.
- It's the truth.

4. Learn your color wheel.
- I have permanately squinty eyes from pages that use an off- white background and light blue text.

5. Control the flow.
- The Anglo-saxon eye travels from left to right. That's how we read, and that's how we look at things upon first glance. You can easily direct eye-movement by using well place lines and graphics to any area of the screen you want. Try not to pull the eye in too many places at once. Someone can get hurt.

I don't pretend to be a master of design, and I've barely touched upon design elements in general... but I think that I have a good natural sense, and have taken a few classes. I recomend Design classes for anyone who plans on building web-pages professionally.
Finnaly, here's a few links for some web-pages that have deemed design-safe by Trolls everywhere.

Modern Gypsy

Amazon.com - THE ONline bookstore

Dream Catcher's CGI Scripts

Guiness Brewing

David Bowie.Com -David's internet service provider.

Protagonist

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Protagonist
� 1998