In the spirit of design simplicity I’ve been thinking about the essence of a blog post. What’s absolutely necessary and what’s desirable to include in the design of a typical blog post?
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Simplicity is the ultimate form of sophistication
—Leonardo da Vinci
In his now classic book Art and Visual Perception, Rudolph Arnheim noted that people will perceive and interpret ambiguous or complex shapes as the simplest form possible. There’s something inherent in us that prefers the simple to the complex.
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What makes for good design? Are there general principles for what makes one design better than another that can guide us? Dieter Rams thought so.
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People begin forming judgements about you, your site, your business in an instant. Canadian researches at Carleton University suggested that within 50 ms (1/20th of a second) visitors to your site are making judgements about its visual appeal.
How much can you communicate in 50ms?
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Forms are how we interact with websites. We use forms to contact site owners, login to applications, reply to comments and so much more. Forms generally don’t inspire love. We don’t like filling them out or creating them. html5 forms want to help change that.
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A few months ago I shared 23 design books I’ve read and enjoyed. In a comment Aman asked if I could do the same for development books. This post would suggest the answer is yes.
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If you are an artist, you can do anything you want. It’s perfectly all right. Design serves a different purpose. If in the process of solving a problem you create a problem, obviously, you didn’t design.
—Massimo Vignelli
A few weeks ago I offered some tips for setting up a baseline grid. In a comment Raul wondered why most articles about baseline grids focused on textual elements while not mentioning non-textual elements such as forms.
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A few months ago I posted about 4 different types of grids common in design — the manuscript grid, the column grid, the modular grid, and the hierarchical grid.
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When people talk about typographic grids it often revolves around the horizontal and aligning elements to columns of precise widths. The vertical gets slighted at times due to the dynamic heights of web pages.
However, we shouldn’t ignore the vertical. We should set the vertical to a baseline grid.
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