heisel.org

The design is the message

Friday | April 25, 2003 | 1:31 pm  

Zeld­man, in the course of sev­eral days has gone from saying, right­fully, that the design is an inher­ent part of con­tent and that’s why he didn’t have an RSS feed, to cre­at­ing his own hand-​rolled feed.

He appar­ently got some nasty com­ments, and has said that design is still a form of con­tent and that his feed is merely the moral equiv­a­lent of an opt-​in e-mail system. I take the same view of my RSS feed. It is merely another method to attract read­ers to my site and let them know of updates.

I applaud Mr. Zeld­man for taking the, often unpop­u­lar, stance that design is a part of con­tent. There are a lot of Web “designers” out there who either a.) never learned about content-​driven design or b.) learned about it and don’t care.

I am an unabashed sup­porter of content-​driven design: design isn’t just about looks. Design is about solv­ing prob­lems, help­ing read­ers (view­ers, lis­ten­ers, etc.) find what they want and telling sto­ries. Put simply, we are here to com­mu­ni­cate, the words that are writ­ten, the photos that are shot and edited, and the pages put together should all serve to send a mes­sage: prefer­ably one uni­fied message.

Many “designers” on the Web today are just styl­ists who can make things look “cool.”

I’ll take com­mu­ni­ca­tion over cool any day…

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