❀ Beauty is Only Screen Deep ❀

The real beauty of almost anything is its usefulness.  The ocean is beautiful when you stare at it on your vacation away from work.  When in such condition, your brain relates the ocean to freeing from hardship and relaxation; however, the ocean becomes a nightmare if you are trapped in the middle of it, nothing but you and the infinite ocean with no sign of life in any direction, and at anytime you could be swallowed by it.  How beautiful can the ocean really be in this condition?  Like everything else in this world, beauty is subjective.  As a designer, to make something beautiful is to make something useful, practical and bring pleasant feelings to its users.

Mobile vs Desktop Usage Chart
Chart by TechCrunch, based on comScore's 2017 Mobile Usage Report


It has been almost 30 years since Tim Berners-Lee first proposed and introduced the World Wide Web to the world in 1989.  Many changes have progressed since then.  The top internet connection speed today is over 30 thousand times faster than when it was in the 1990s (Comcast offers Xfinity Gigabit Pro with a maximum connection speed of 2 gigabits per second.  It is nearly 36 thousand times faster than the 56 kilobits per second modem of the early 1990s.)  The web is also no longer tied to a heavy stationary metal box that needs to be plugged into a power outlet, the majority of web use today is on mobile devices.  Many of these changes greatly affect web designing trends.  While the internet speed has dramatically become much faster, web designers have to consider designing websites that are compatible with and friendly for mobile devices.  So while accessibility to higher speed internet connection allows web designers to explore the freedom of implementing high quality multimedia, they also have to consider the many limitations inherent to mobile devices, such as screen size and battery life.

One principle that is true in many disciplines is that you cannot please everyone.  Knowing your target audience is the true key to successful web designing.  You cannot design a web site that is friendly for impoverish children who may still use old PCs that run on Windows 95, while at the same time maximize the potential power of the latest HTML5 to gain the appeal of highly sophisticated tech natives.  Doing so, the website will appear broken for both of those user groups.  One may design a website that compliments the blind, but those who are not so blind might seek elsewhere to fully indulge their sense of sight.  One can focus on designing a website that is optimized for search engines, but such effort might be counter-productive if the cause of the site requires anonymity.  One can make a website that is friendly to browse by using nothing but the keyboard, but what good is this "accessibility" in the age of touchscreens when almost every mobile device has no keyboard built in?

The real beauty of almost anything is its usefulness in the eye of the beholder.  Before burning the cash on expensive web builder software and services, the number one key principle of web designing is knowing who the website is designed for.  As long as the website is useful, practical and brings pleasant feelings to the targeted consumer group, the design is a success.

Comments

  1. Professor Charles EvansJune 8, 2017 at 8:49 AM

    Completely true what you ave written here, but web design now allows you to design a specific site for different display options, handheld, tablet, notebook, etc.
    You did not review any of the unit 4 sites, nor did you offer any comments about your project.

    ReplyDelete

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