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The lastest issue of .Net magazine (#154) has an article by Andy Rutledge, in which complains that not enough is done to inspire good design in people who do not come from a design background. And I agree with him.

Ever since the advent of HTML, anyone with a bit of a techie background has been able to put together a home page of their own and let it loose on the web.

In my time, I’ve stumbled across some truely shocking examples of bad design. I’m sure you know the sort of thing – fonts all sizes and clashing colours, forty different typfaces in use; nothing lines up; everything screams at you, and basically you can’t be bothered to see the wood (good content) for the trees (hideous design). Recently, I found the XOXO blog, and I’m afraid it’s assault on my eyeballs prevented me from actually reading the blog to see if there was any useful information there. I just felt ill. [Sorry guys if you read this via trackback, but I'm afraid it's not just a matter of personal taste, there are also usability/accessibility issues which have been resolutely ignored ]

My background is geeky rather than arty (my degree was Electronic Engineering; the only thing we ever “designed” was the odd circuit board layout!). So aside from my latent arty tendencies with my photography, how did I pick up the basics of good design?

When I first started web design (with lovely Notepad) back in 1996, I made all the mistakes a novice can. There are some nasty memories lurking out there in the WayBack Machine! But I later found two books by Robin Williams very useful (no, not that Robin Williams, this one is a woman!). They are:

The Non-Designers’ Design Book – Robin Williams, Peachpit Press
Giving the basic principles of good design, layout, use of space, etc. Robin remembers the four major elements of design by a handy little acronym, I’m sure you’ll be able to work out what it is:

• Contrast
• Repetition
• Alignment
• Proximity

Her book is anything but! It exapans on each of these elements as you go through each chapter. The second is:

The Non-Designers’ Type Book – Robin Williams, Peachpit Press
Which shows you the right and wrong ways to go about using typography in your designs.

Both books are primarily aimed at design for print, and although print and web are quite different in some ways, the principles still hold true for the design of a web page.

If you’re just starting out (or would like to learn about some of the formal grammar of design), you might well find these helpful.

I’ve been quiet on the blogging front lately, just rather busy to keep up!

Today I was sent an invitation to the d.Construct2006 Backnetwork, which is a great site for attendees of the upcoming d.Construct event in Brighton on 8th September. If you’re not already signed up, I’m afraid you will have to wait until next time, as they are full. But the Backnetwork site provides an excellent place for attendees to “meet”, chat, review etc. All the better if you forget to give someone your business card at the event; if you know their name, you can go look them up on the site afterwards.

I will post more on the actual event once it happens. But as I was browsing the Backnetwork site, I stumbled across references to XFN – short for XHTML Friends Network. It’s a great way of adding extra meaning to links in your blogroll, for instance, which tell others who are reading, about your relationship with the person concerned. It’s dead easy to implement (read the four easy steps showing you how to go about it). In it’s simplest form, you just add an extra rel=”met” tag to any links for people you have actually met in person. So if I had met the ficticious Joe Bloggs and wanted to add his blog to my blogroll, I would use:

<a href=”http://joebloggs.com/blog” rel=”met”>Joe’s Blog</a>.

If he was also a friend, I would add rel=”friend met”. There are a few other options, (which you can read about in more detail here), but it’s pretty simple to remember, and will add a human dimension to ordinary links.

So I thought I would XFN my blogroll so you can see who’s who. Why not tag along and make your blogroll XFN-friendly too?

Have you read .Net magazine recently?

I’ve never been an avid reader, but I was browsing Andy Budd’s website the other day, and a blog post about .Net mag caught my eye, which made me go and search it out at Smith’s on my way home from work.

It is indeed a very good read, and I’ll give you a short summary of the best bits, if you like:

Interview with Joshua Schachter, founder of del.icio.us
Articles on blogging for businesses, how the royalnavy.mod.uk website was given a makeover, including accessibility considerations and a showcase on the best in current web design.
Makeover Suggestions for gardenaction.co.uk to make it more user focussed
Tutorials, lots of tutorials, and certainly not all aimed at the “hobbyist”, including:

• Simple liquid layouts using CSS
• Giving your photos the Lomo treatment with Photoshop
• Easy Google Maps programming with AJAX
• Securing your PHP eCommerce scripts
• Generating SVG graphics with Inkscape (open source app available from the CD with the mag)
• How to make great-looking pull quotes with CSS

The usual news, reviews, expert opinion and letters pages.
A fun bit at the end, the /trash section, which included a link to the ridiculous website, catsthatlooklikehitler.com

At £5.99 per issue, you might think it’s a bit steep. But if you subscribe by direct debit, apparently you only pay £11.79 every three months. Now that’s tempting…