A Dao of Web Design — A List Apart ➟

The web is a new medium, although it has emerged from the medium of print­ing, whose skills, design lan­guage and con­ven­tions strongly influ­ence it. Yet it is often too shaped by that from which it sprang. “Killer Web Sites” are usu­ally those which tame the wild­ness of the web, con­strain­ing pages as if they were made of paper – Desk­top Pub­lish­ing for the Web. This con­ser­vatism is nat­ural, “closely held beliefs are not eas­ily released”, but it is time to move on, to embrace the web as its own medium. It’s time to throw out the rit­u­als of the printed page, and to engage the medium of the web and its own nature.

This is not for a moment to say we should aban­don the wis­dom of hun­dreds of years of print­ing and thou­sands of years of writ­ing. But we need to under­stand which of these lessons are appro­pri­ate for the web, and which mere rituals.

This is just a tremen­dous piece of text. John All­sopp clearly wrote down a man­i­festo on web design, its ethics, prin­ci­ples and beliefs — mak­ing accesse­bil­ity a really impotant point and imper­fec­tion the basic guide­line for the mod­ern inter­webs. What is most fas­ci­nat­ing to me is that stuff is still cur­rent enough to trans­port thoughts and ideas which still matter.

And this is a real proof mak­ing this arti­cle on A List Apart a must-read for every aspir­ing and seri­ous web designer out there. Take your­self 15 min­utes of time and slowly get these many para­graphs and tons of well-presented infor­ma­tion into your mind. You will be a bet­ter per­son after­wards — definitely.