rowid,title,contents,year,author,author_slug,published,url,topic
217,Beyond Web Mechanics – Creating Meaningful Web Design,"It was just over three years ago when I embarked on becoming a web designer, and the first opinion piece about the state of web design I came across was a conference talk by Elliot Jay Stocks called ‘Destroy the Web 2.0 Look’. Elliot’s presentation was a call to arms, a plea to web designers the world over to stop the endless reproductions of the so called ‘Web 2.0 look’.

Three and a half years on from Elliot’s talk, what has changed? Well, from an aesthetic standpoint, not a whole lot. The Web 2.0 look has evolved, but it’s still with us and much of the web remains filled with cookie cutter websites that bear a striking resemblance to one another. This wouldn’t matter so much if these websites were selling comparable services or products, but they’re not. They look similar, they follow the same web design trends; their aesthetic style sends out a very similar message, yet they’re selling completely different services or products. How can you be communicating effectively with your users when your online book store is visually indistinguishable from an online cosmetic store? This just doesn’t make sense. 

I don’t want to belittle the current version of the Web 2.0 look for the sake of it. I want to talk about the opportunity we have as web designers to create more meaningful experiences for the people using our websites. Using design wisely gives us the ability to communicate messages, ideas and attitudes that our users will understand and connect with.

Being human

As human beings we respond emotionally to everything around us – people, objects, posters, packaging or websites. We also respond in different ways to different kinds of aesthetic design and style. We care about style and aesthetics deeply, whether we realise it or not. Aesthetic design has the power to attract or repel. We often make decisions based purely on aesthetics and style – and don’t retailers the world over know it! We connect attitudes and strongly held beliefs to style. Individuals will proudly associate themselves with a certain style or aesthetic because it’s an expression of who they are. You know that old phrase, ‘Don’t judge a book by its cover’?  Well, the problem is that people do, so it’s important we get the cover right.

Much is made of how to structure web pages, how to create a logical information hierarchy, how to use layout and typography to clearly communicate with your users. It’s important, however, not to mistake clarity of information or legibility with getting your message across. Few users actually read websites word by word: it’s far more likely they’ll just scan the page. If the page is copy-heavy and nothing grabs their attention, they may well just move on. This is why it’s so important to create a visual experience that actually means something to the user. 

Meaningful design

When we view a poster or website, we make split-second assessments and judgements of what is in front of us. Our first impressions of what a website does or who it is aimed at are provoked by the style and aesthetic of the website. For example, with clever use of colour, typography, graphic design and imagery we can communicate to users that an organisation is friendly, edgy, compassionate, fun or environmentally conscious.

Using a certain aesthetic we can convey the personality of that organisation, target age ranges, different sexes or cultural groups, communicate brand attributes, and more. We can make our users feel like they’re part of something and, perhaps even more importantly, we can make new users want to be a part of something. And we can achieve all this before the user has read a single word. 

By establishing a website’s aesthetic and creating a meaningful visual language, a design is no longer just a random collection of pretty gradients that have been plucked out of thin air. There can be a logic behind the design decisions we make. So, before you slap another generic piece of ribbon or an ultra shiny icon into the top-left corner of your website, think about why you are doing it. If you can’t come up with a reason better than “I saw it on another website”, it’s probably a poor application of style.

Design and style

There are a number of reasons why the web suffers from a lack meaningful design. Firstly, there are too many preconceptions of what a website should look like. It’s too easy for designers to borrow styles from other websites, thereby limiting the range of website designs we see on the web. Secondly, many web designers think of aesthetic design as of secondary importance, which shouldn’t be the case. Designing websites that are accessible and easy to use is, of course, very important but this is the very least a web designer should be delivering. Easy to use websites should come as standard – it’s equally important to create meaningful, compelling and beautiful experiences for everyone who uses our websites. The aesthetics of your site are part of the design, and to ignore this and play down the role of aesthetic design is just a wasted opportunity. 

No compromise necessary

Easy to use, accessible websites and beautiful, meaningful aesthetics are not mutually exclusive. The key is to apply style and aesthetic design appropriately. We need to think about who and what we’re designing for and ask ourselves why we’re applying a certain kind of aesthetic style to our design. If you do this, there’s no reason why effective, functional design should come at the expense of jaw-dropping, meaningful aesthetics.

Web designers need to understand the differences between functional design and aesthetic design but, even more importantly, they need to know how to make them work together.  It’s combining these elements of design successfully that makes for the best web design in the world.",2010,Mike Kus,mikekus,2010-12-05T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2010/beyond-web-mechanics-creating-meaningful-web-design/,design
222,Golden Spirals,"As building blocks go, the rectangle is not one to overwhelm the designer with decisions. On the face of it, you have two options: you can set the width, and the height. But despite this apparent simplicity, there are combinations of width and height that can look unbalanced. If a rectangle is too tall and slim, it might appear precarious. If it is not tall enough, it may simply look flat. But like a guitar string that’s out of tune, you can tweak the proportions little by little until a rectangle feels, as Goldilocks said, just right.

A golden rectangle has its height and width in the golden ratio, which is approximately 1:1.618. These proportions have long been recognised as being aesthetically harmonious. Whether through instruction or by intuition, artists have understood how to exploit these proportions over the centuries. Examples can be found in classical architecture, medieval book construction, and even in the recent #newtwitter redesign.

A mathematical curiosity







The golden rectangle is unique, in that if you remove a square section from it, what is left behind is itself a golden rectangle. The removal of a square can be repeated on the rectangle that is left behind, and then repeated again, as many times as you like. This means that the golden rectangle can be treated as a building block for recursive patterns. In this article, we will exploit this property to build a golden spiral, using only HTML and CSS.

The markup

The HTML we’ll use for this study is simply a series of nested <div>s.

<body>
	<div id=""container"">
		<div class=""cycle"">
			<div>
				<div>
					<div>
						<div class=""cycle"">
							<div>
								<div>
									<div>
										<div class=""cycle"">
											<div>
												<div>
													<div>
														<div class=""cycle""></div>
													</div>
												</div>
											</div>
										</div>
									</div>
								</div>
							</div>
						</div>
					</div>
				</div>
			</div>
		</div>
	</div>
</body>

The first of these has the class cycle, and so does every fourth ancestor thereafter. The spiral completes a cycle every four steps, so this class allows styles to be reused on <div>s that appear at the same position in each cycle.

Golden proportions

To create our spiral we are going to exploit the unique properties of the golden rectangle, so our first priority is to ensure that we have a golden rectangle to begin with. If we pick a length for the short edge – say, 288 pixels – we can then calculate the length of the long edge by multiplying this value by 1.618. In this case, 288 × 1.618 = 466, so our starting point will be a <div> with these properties:

#container > div {
  width: 466px;
  height: 288px;
}

The greater than symbol is used here to single out the immediate child of the #container element, without affecting the grandchild or any of the more distant descendants.

We could go on to specify the precise pixel dimensions of every child element, but that means doing a lot of sums. It would be much easier if we just specified the dimensions for each element as a percentage of the width and height of its parent. This also has the advantage that if you change the size of the outermost container, all nested elements would be resized automatically – something that we shall exploit later.







The approximate value of 38.2% can be derived from (100 × 1 − phi) ÷ phi, where the Greek letter phi (ϕ) stands for the golden ratio. The value of phi can be expressed as phi = (1 + √5 ) ÷ 2, which is approximately 1.618. You don’t have to understand the derivation to use it. Just remember that if you start with a golden rectangle, you can slice 38.2% from it to create a new golden rectangle.

This can be expressed in CSS quite simply:

.cycle,
.cycle > div > div {
  height: 38.2%;
  width: 100%;
}
.cycle > div,
.cycle > div > div > div {
  width: 38.2%;
  height: 100%;
}

You can see the result so far by visiting Demo One. With no borders or shading, there is nothing to see yet, so let’s address that next.

Shading with transparency

We’ll need to apply some shading to distinguish each segment of the spiral from its neighbours. We could start with a white background, then progress through shades of grey: #eee, #ddd, #ccc and so on, but this means hard-coding the background-color for every element. A more elegant solution would be to use the same colour for every element, but to make each one slightly transparent.

The nested <div>s that we are working with could be compared to layers in Photoshop. By applying a semi-transparent shade of grey, each successive layer can build on top of the darker layers beneath it. The effect accumulates, causing each successive layer to appear slightly darker than the last. In his 2009 article for 24 ways, Drew McLellan showed how to create a semi-transparent effect by working with RGBA colour. Here, we’ll use the colour black with an alpha value of 0.07.

#container div { background-color: rgba(0,0,0,0.07) }

Note that I haven’t used the immediate child selector here, which means that this rule will apply to all <div> elements inside the #container, no matter how deeply nested they are. You can view the result in Demo Two. As you can see, the golden rectangles alternate between landscape and portrait orientation.



Demo Three).



CSS3 specification indicates that a percentage can be used to set the border-radius property, but using percentages does not achieve consistent results in browsers today. Luckily, if you specify a border-radius in pixels using a value that is greater than the width and height of the element, then the resulting curve will use the shorter length side as its radius. This produces exactly the effect that we want, so we’ll use an arbitrarily high value of 10,000 pixels for each border-radius:

.cycle {
  border-radius: 0px;
  border-bottom-left-radius: 10000px;
}
.cycle > div {
  border-radius: 0px;
  border-bottom-right-radius: 10000px;
}
.cycle > div > div {
  border-radius: 0px;
  border-top-right-radius: 10000px;
}
.cycle > div > div > div {
  border-radius: 0px;
  border-top-left-radius: 10000px;
}

Note that the specification for the border-radius property is still in flux, so it is advisable to use vendor-specific prefixes. I have omitted them from the example above for the sake of clarity, but if you view source on Demo Four then you’ll see that the actual styles are not quite as brief.







Filling the available space

We have created an approximation of the Golden Spiral using only HTML and CSS. Neat! It’s a shame that it occupies just a fraction of the available space. As a finishing touch, let’s make the golden spiral expand or contract to use the full space available to it.

Ideally, the outermost container should use the full available width or height that could accomodate a rectangle of golden proportions. This behaviour is available for background images using the “ background-size: contain; property, but I know of no way to make block level HTML elements behave in this fashion (if I’m missing something, please enlighten me). Where CSS fails to deliver, JavaScript can usually provide a workaround. This snippet requires jQuery:

$(document).ready(function() {
	var phi = (1 + Math.sqrt(5))/2;

	$(window).resize(function() {
		var goldenWidth  = windowWidth  = $(this).width(),
			goldenHeight = windowHeight = $(this).height();

		if (windowWidth/windowHeight > phi) {
			// panoramic viewport – use full height
			goldenWidth  = windowHeight * phi;
		} else {
			// portrait viewport  – use full width
			goldenHeight = windowWidth / phi;
		};

	$(""#container > div.cycle"")
		.width(goldenWidth)
		.height(goldenHeight);

	}).resize();

});

You can view the result by visiting Demo Five.







Is it just me, or can you see an elephant in there?

You can probably think of many ways to enhance this further, but for this study we’ll leave it there. It has been a good excuse to play with proportions, positioning and the immediate child selector, as well as new CSS3 features such as border-radius and RGBA colours. If you are not already designing with golden proportions, then perhaps this will inspire you to begin.",2010,Drew Neil,drewneil,2010-12-07T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2010/golden-spirals/,design