Taking Your Talent to the Web- P3:It was a simple solution to a complex problem. On one side, thousands of designers and art directors are eager to take their talents to the Web but aren’t sure how. On the other, web agencies could not find enough good web designers to get their work done. | Taking Your Talent to the Web 11 the project life cycle and a detailed definition of the web designer s role. If you d like to hear more about how smart you are for deciding to learn about web design phone your Mom that is if she s forgiven you for that cheap floral bouquet you got her. On the other hand if you re ready to plunge into the most interesting aspects of web design Chapter 2 Designing for the Medium has your name on it baby. But before you dive into it we need to make one more prefatory point. Smash Your Altars With the exception of a few facts everything in this book is subject to debate. Web design like the medium is too new to be bound by fusty rules. When we explain general principles and accepted practices our goals are to clarify how the medium functions and to ground you in the thinking and methods of most working web practitioners. You will need to know this in order to do your job. But it is only the beginning and you are encouraged to constantly think beyond everything we tell you here. For every ten sites that fail because they ve ignored a certain web verity for instance that navigation should be clear and streamlined there is at least one site that succeeds precisely because it violates this rule in a unique and brilliant way. For every hundred sites that fundamentally misunderstand the medium by behaving like static Illustrator layouts there is one that achieves greatness by doing so. Most web designers begin each project by considering the end-user. But we know of at least one certifiable web design genius who starts every job by inventing dynamic behaviors he has never seen on anyone else s sites and then following those behaviors wherever they lead. Remarkably enough they lead to professional and usable sites whose uniqueness delights precisely the users they were intended to serve. This should not work at all but it not only does work it enlarges what the Web can be. There is stupidity and there is a lot of it . And then there is .
