What’s the Difference?

Well, quite a bit. There definitely is some intersection of skills when creating the visual design of a site and putting it together, however, those skills are still quite separate. It can be debated exactly where the visual design of a site ends and its craft begins. I generally feel the visual design phase ends and craft begins when you move from creation to implementation of the final product. HTML is our pencil, CSS our exacto knife. The tools we use are ends to a mean. Without a blueprint, they do nothing.

The Relationship Between Design and Craft

I went to an art school which centered around print design and pushed importance of craft. The only problem was, just being fresh out of a computer science program, I had lost the ability to to use my hands other than to operate a mouse and keyboard. It was a difficult transition, but I learned that even the best design would look shabby at best if poorly rendered, mounted or bound. The final project in one of my classes was a magazine which was to be designed and bound for the critique. Halfway through the project, both the instructor and I were very happy with the concept of the design and direction of the spreads – it was just a matter of putting it all together. That is where things went downhill. After agonizing hours spent putting the book together, it refused to open the day of the crit. That is a problem considering that books are meant to be opened. From that day on, I knew that craft would never be my strong suit. I could do your basic cropping and mounting, but nothing past the rudimentary level. I understood that I would have to concentrate on the design and defer on the craft. There is nothing particularly wrong with this, it was just something I had to be aware of or risk a lower quality final product.

To bring this back to focus, HTML, CSS, AJAX, and many more technological acroynms to come, are the end result of a design created on paper. They are executions of ideas. They are our craft. Just like craft is important in traditional forms of graphic design, such as making a book, it is also important to web design. Craft is the realization of the concept, the final product that people will interact with. Still, it is only the final step in a long process. For the last few years, it seems as though the web design community has been much more focused on the craft of their design than the actual design itself. Obviously, we cannot ignore how we put a site together, but the most masterfully created site that neglects the other portions of the design process will turn out medicore at best. Are hot new CSS techniques pushing the direction in your design? They shouldn’t. How should not drive a design but rather why. We need to be aware of the craft, in order to make smart design choices, but the concept and design should be the driving force. Sometimes something just flat out cannot be built which obviously is a time where the visual design needs to be re-evaluated. Still, the concept and visual language should be front-and-center in how those changes are applied to a technical alteration. Am I the only person that has witnessed the opposite?

Where Does Usability Reside?

Just like how building a website can be broken into design and craft, I feel usability can as well. We all know how a site is put together can dramatically impact usability, but how a site is designed equally influences the usability of a site. How navigation is visually organized and laid out should be given equal attention to how it is semantically created. We talk a lot about the craft of usability, but many less people write extensively about the design of usability. Jakob Nielsen, in all of his controversial charm, is one of foremost usability design folks out there. I think we all would hope he would pay more attention the the visual aesthetics of design, but he brings up very good and inciteful points to designing usable websites. Ironically, his site still uses a table-based layout and some very “unique” CSS methods. If anyone should understand the caveats of that, it should be him. If only we could could genetically splice him with Shaun Inman and Jeffery Zeldman, we’d have a web design super-hero.

Dude, tables? That doesn’t seem very usable…

A Balanced Discourse is Needed

Craft is the realization of the concept, the final product that people will interact with. Still, it is only the final step in a long process.

It may seem as though I am putting an uneven amount of importance in design. Rather, I mean to emphasize that each phase has its purpose and order. Both pieces cannot work without the other, but there is still a heirarchy. A strong piece of work for the web medium needs to place equal attention to design and craft. Either one should spend the time to do both well or defer to someone in the process. Ideally, the designer should understand the craft for making a website in order to better know what can and cannot be done in the medium. At the very least, the designer should respect the aspect of craft and how it relates to the experience of the final product. Ignorance to how websites are put together usually ends with a design that is frustrating to both the person responsible to make it and the people that are trying to use it. Conversely, a CSS ninja should have some knowledge in the discipline of design. A lacking of design fundamentals will many times end with a design which does not aid in the user’s experience, or worse, detracts from it.

Much of this community focus in craft might have something to do with the fact that the majority are still technology-centered. A large portion of people that build websites have some sort of programming background and seem to be predisposed towards the technical side of web design. In addition, our craft techniques (CSS, HTML, etc.), while debatable to some degree, are much more objective than design process and theory. Some would argue that there really are not any solid answers to strong design and its process, just philosophies. All rules in design have a time and a place where they can (and should) be broken. There will always be a level of subjectivity to it which can make writing about it more difficult. When writing about design, finding “the answer” is not the point but rather to discuss the ideas and concepts relating to it. Sometimes I think the zeal to push standards on how to craft websites has spilled over into how to design websites. We should never forget that our craft is the execution of our design, not the other way around.