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For web design to be considered a serious profession in India we need to improve our workmanship, and strive for a new standard of quality in our work. We need to develop our own ideologies for designing for the web. These ideologies should be based on old as well as new design principles without ignoring emerging techniques, skills and artful execution. The ones listed below are my personal ideologies, so they will reflect my experiences & education. Take them with a pinch of salt, sugar or any other taste modifier and develop your own. Because, let’s face it. Web design in India needs to get it’s act together.
Websites shouldn’t be built without taking the time to understand the need, to do research, to analyze. Design should be broken into layers of style, content & behavior so that we can focus on each separately. Ornamentation should be well balanced with function so that it enhances the experience and not distract from it. Beautiful code & markup should be given the same respect as negative space. Task analysis and user-testing is just as important as the baseline grid.
Design for the web needs a revival of an honesty & truth to the material from which it is constructed, the pixel. Decorative devices like cup stains, scribble fonts and pins on paper disguise the nature of the machine. We need to acknowledge the problems & limitations of the computer, but also recognize how it can be used for our benefit. We should create usable, easily understood interfaces within the machine environment. We should encourage documentation and meet the deadline. Respect the contract. No free pitches.
We should follow, adopt or create standards for the web whenever we can. We should use interface patterns and templates to offer more manageable ways of arranging content for clients. We should embrace modular systems that encourage new and creative implementations. Display systems should have logical as well as creative justifications. We need to test our interfaces with real users and iterate quickly.
Accessibility and usability should be at the centre of decision-making. We should try to construct relevant meaning without confusing the user. Just because we have a million colors to play with doesn’t mean we should. We need new approaches to design that rejects old styles in search of new ones that are more expressive of our time.
This is a relatively new profession. We should be prepared for changes. We should be well-educated, flexible and experienced. We need to be specialized. We need to know the elements of design and their underlying logic and how they apply to the web. We should understand the difference between presentation logic and business logic.
We should study the nature of objects before designing them. Only by constantly evolving, learning new techniques, new processes, and discovering new ways of putting things together can we create a mature design. We need to understand that the website is not a business card, book, brochure or poster. We need to learn from the scientific theories of human-computer interaction to study the way users and communities engage with the web.