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How to Spot Quality within Web Design: Examples & Tips
- _pius 18y agoThis is a superb article.
- mahmud 18y agoGreat article!
- krav 18y agoWay too focused on pretty design. Give me a simple, clean site with a single big call-to-action button. In the end, detail to what converts users matters, not typography or richness of color.
- JoelSutherland 18y agoI disagree. Here are the 7 points: 1. Spacing 2. Pixel Perfect Detail 3. Well thought out Typography 4. Organization of Elements 5. Restraint and Subtlety 6. Using Color to its Full Potential 7. Doing something Nobody else has done Considering the content of each of the points, I would argue that at worst only 2 and 7 focus on form over function. If you're a person that has a hard time telling if a design is good or not this is a great list. Also, design must start somewhere. You cannot A/B test starting from a blank page.
- foulmouthboy 18y agoAnd even then, item 2 is a simple example of how attention to seemingly slight details can draw the eye to site features without resorting to a big button.
- RossM 18y agoNot that a big button isn't always out of place. I do think that the elegant details applied to a relatively simple design can help bring the quality of the design up. Simple touches help make a simple design a pleasure to use.
- potatolicious 18y agoIt also sets ambience and establishes your brand image subconsciously. You wouldn't try serving $50 steaks in a run-down diner, so why would you try to sell an upscale product on a site with no attention to detail?
- noodle 18y agoin the end, visually appealing design tends to convert more users than plain-but-functional design.
- tokenadult 18y agoWhat is the evidence for that?
- logjam 18y agoThe many misspellings and grammatical errors in an article pushing the importance of pretty, colored, 1px borders as an indicator of "quality" just looks like the same old advocacy of flash over substance. No thanks. We've had enough of that over the last decade.
- michael_dorfman 18y agoI was wondering why I would want to "Design using a gird system"
- radley 18y agoStandard stuff in web design. A grid allows content to be constrained and opens up negative space which is essential to a relaxed and consistent flow.
- scott_s 18y agoHe wasn't questioning why one would want to use a grid system. He was pointing out the typo in an article about quality - gird versus grid.
- Silhouette 18y agoThough perhaps we should question the increasing (IME) emphasis on grid systems in web design. Sure, using grids is easy, and we shouldn't be different just to be different, but who says there is no more effective way to present a site than a load of rectangles with a bit of space between them? A lot of the Web is becoming rather cliched in this respect, just like frames and table layouts before.
- Timothee 18y agoGood point. To me, the emphasis on grid systems is mostly to improve designs made by people not necessarily talented in design. In that it's something one might not know about even though it improves a design without doing much. Moving completely away from grid systems to have something different probably needs more talent in the design department and can not be achieved by anybody.
- yan 18y agoBeautifully composed. Makes me wish I was graphically talented...
- mattyfo 18y agoBeautifully composed. Makes me a little more graphically talented...
- noodle 18y agoBeautifully composed. Makes me want to go back and revamp most of my designs.
- timcederman 18y agoWhat is this, Reddit?
- noodle 18y agowow. this severely disappoints me. i've never posted or really read reddit ever. i tried to be a little clever in my response (operative word: tried) and get crushed. if i would've rephrased my response it would've likely gone unnoticed. this anti-reddit fervor that has been developing over the last few months seems to have converted itself into a "no fun allowed" atmosphere, and that just plain sucks. that is not how a community works.
- bdr 18y agoYour first sentence literally added zero new information, because, as you know, it was also present in the parent post. Content comes before fun. I didn't downvote you. I just want to let you know how people vote on this site. People also appreciate capitalization.
- noodle 18y agoi know, i've been here for more than a year and was on the top 100 list for a while. no need to patronize. what i wrote was not present in the parent post. this article literally made me go back and check, revamp, and do mild redesigns to almost every site that i have control over. this is statement of fact that i tried to express in an apparently disagreeable manner in my op.
- saturdayplace 18y agoOne of the best resources for getting typography right on the web: http://www.webtypography.net/ http://www.webtypography.net/.
- nocman 18y agoI found it amusing how awful the text (or should I say "the typography") for the introduction and table of contents from that site looks in Firefox on Linux (on my machine). I'm sure it is due to the site using fonts not availble in my installation, or something similar to that. Still, it was amusing. I'd be curious to hear if others had the same experience. In case anyone cares, I can't remember the last time I had the text on a web site look so bad with this setup. I visit a lot of sites, and I haven't had one look this bad for a long time. It is still readable, but if it was my site on web typography, I wouldn't want it to look that way.
- thristian 18y agoIt looks pretty great to me (using a Firefox 3.5 nightly under Linux), but then I've configured Firefox to use the Android system fonts, and unticked "Allow pages to choose their own fonts, instead of my selections above". It's amazing how much better pages look when they use a nice font, instead of whatever lowest-common-denominator font the original author put up with.