Articles about Web Design

I have just posted a link to a Word document that contains direct links to a group of articles available from the Peachpit.com/articles website. These articles are by authors of recent books related to web design or they are actual chapters from books. I listed these to suggest that this is a way of keeping up with the latest resources as well as get in touch with authors you may not have read before. There is a wealth of material about progressive enhancement, html5, css3, designing with grids, and other interesting design issues. To get to the list go to my ftp site and the resources at the bottom of the page, Articles & Books. Look for the “alistofarticles.doc” link to download the linked titles. I will add a list of relevant books in a short time. If you go to the peachpit site, articles section, and select the “web design & development” topic from the left side menu,  you’ll find many more articles on other topics of interest for your reading.

Major changes in Web design/development

Now that I have finally had the time to read Andy Clarke’s “Transitioning CSS: the fine art of web design”, I sense that I am discovering the next level of web design, one that challenges the way we currently think about the design process. His ideas and suggestions for a new set of “best practices” not only makes sense, it evolves the art and changes the emphasis from design to making meaning.

Clarke notes that “it has been a common working practice in both print and Web design for designers to lay out their pages using Greeking text (the familiar Lorem Ipsum)…Mock text doesn’t provide the meaning you want in order to begin immediately marking up you documents semantically”. The challenge is that we cannot possibly work with the specifics of well-formed semantic markup without the content that defines the meaning of what is to be marked-up.