A Crash Course in Information and Visual Design

by sfard • 14 years ago

51 15 14 years ago

sfard5• 14 years ago

I wrote this cause I had some time and figured I could have used something like this when I started out. I hope it's helpful.

ville• 14 years ago

It gives a good overview of the topics that made me want to learn more about them. I think some links to resources for further information after each section would be very useful for someone using this article as a starting point.

sfard5• 14 years ago

Good point - I'll add some reference material.

volandovengo• 14 years ago

Thanks! It's a great intro. Have any suggestions for online resources to use to go from newbie to novice designer?

namank• 14 years ago

I'm looking into organization of elements so the final formation is pleasing, visually and in other ways. Coming from an engineering background, I had no idea where to start. This helps a lot, thanks!

Would also appreciate any other pointers/links/books/courses you'd recommend, just finished reading the Laws of Simplicity by John Maeda.

sfard5• 14 years ago

A few people asked me for recommended reading, so I added "Additional references" to the bottom of the article. I put a couple of my favorite books there. There are tons of great sources for inspiration online, but as far as educative (wow that's a word?) material goes, a lot of design web articles are sadly pretty crappy.

nanch• 14 years ago

I love this site, keep up the good work.

alok-g• 14 years ago

>> Consider why newspapers are written in columns rather than across the entire page. Or why the text block on this site is only 600 pixels wide.

Why are multiple columns not preferred on the web as opposed to wasting half the screen space. I guess there may be issues with scrolling but those should be solvable.

sfard5• 14 years ago

I would assume your guess is right. You have infinite room to scroll on a browser where you don't on a newspaper.

johncoltrane• 14 years ago

I see three main reasons.

1. The web has its origins in the world of research and academia where most publications have at most 2 columns and usually only one. The current "newspaper/magazine" trend and the challenges associated with it and large display sizes are quite recent.

2. In the early 90s, the average display size was 800x600. At that size, a line of text set at 14px contained roughly 100 characters. Nobody really felt the need for shorter lines. Besides, newspapers don't lay out their content in columns because of legibility concerns but because it makes cutting and moving (parts of) articles easier an improves the general flexibility of their composition. And that's good for advertising, too.

3. Back to the origins of the web, one of the main design goals of its creator was to create a medium that was as independant of the client as possible. From that point of view, columns seem to be quite difficult to execute well. But of course, most of today's web doesn't really fit in their original view.

ayush_gupta2• 14 years ago

excellent read. thanks.

ndunn2• 14 years ago

Excellent post. Would have left a comment on the original article but I'm not about to give permissions to a new app just to leave a comment. Please consider an alternate comment system.

sfard5• 14 years ago

Thanks ndunn2. When I built the commenting system, I figured that asking people for the bare minimum information from their twitter account would be enough to get them to sign up, but it really seems I was wrong. I worried anon posts would result in too many "stfu nigger fag" type comments, and didn't want to give up any design to Disqus. And sign-up on the site I figured was too much of a hastle. Ugh......

hnreader123• 14 years ago

I never appreciated design until I sat down with one of my graphic designer friends. He would spend hours on what I thought were simple things such as typography and placement of objects. Graphic design is under-appreciated and usually goes unnoticed unless it's bad enough to be noticeable.

ayush_gupta2• 14 years ago

In it you say >The "Articles by" pane floats on the right side of the page, but below the title, not inline."<. Do you think having the Articles by section on the right as a fixed div is better since a user will always have them visible on the right? Instead of it getting lost the moment you're finished reading the mere beginning of the article?

A Crash Course in Information and Visual Design

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