Lesson 1: The Basics
Websites are made of many technologies and requires knowledge of several languages to use. Not only does it require the use of several computer languages, it also requires knowledge of another fundamental language, the language of design.
What is Design?
Okay, design isn’t a language per se, it just sounded really poetic. “What is Design?” is a rather weighty question. HTML is HTML, a markup language. Javascript is a scripting language. Those are simple to answer. Design is… a lot more.
Design is a lot of things. To give a global definition of design would take a book or two. We’ll trim down our definition to encompass just our purposes of web design. Even with this massive trimming, it still is a bit of a lengthy answer.
For websites, we have a number of aspects that we need to concern ourselves. These aspects involve the colors used, the images we use (which involves photography, photo manipulation, image optimization, drawing, etc), the typography we use (the text, font, size, style, etc.), the overall layout we use, and even more.
Design even extends beyond the aesthetic aspects of the site. It also extends to how it functions, how you layout the buttons and form elements for used, how you layout the text for accessibility, and when you move onto things like web applications, how you lay out menus, what buttons you make click, etc.
Essentially, you could say that design encompasses everything that is part of the actual website that isn’t directly programming (a bit general, but it’ll work).
Why Worry About Design?
If you are a one-man show, the answer is obvious: because nobody else will do it for you. However, even if you work with a group and have a “designer”, you should still know the basics of design so not only can you assist when necessary, but it’ll also help you understand what’s going on in the designer’s head. You’ll also know a lot of the terminology that they may use, so it’ll help you out as well.
In this lesson we just discussed what design is and why you should learn it, even if you aren’t going to act as the designer. In our next lesson we’ll begin with one of the basics of design: color theory.
