Good and Bad Design

Erika Adams
I have found that after reading "how to recognize good & bad design" that my web page for class has some major violations! I think after a second look, my font may by too small in some portions and too large in others. The large font only emphasizes the fact that the page belongs to an absolute beginner in web building! I have the title of my project going down the side of the page - a major no no according to this. I do think that having font this direction confuses the eye and distracts from the overall neatness of the page. When I designed my page for class, I was thinking about what colors to use based on mainly complementary colors. Now I realize that it would be much more effective to simply choose contrasting colors.
I want to give my page a more "sophisticated" look. I think that if I corrected the previously listed problems, along with a better organization of information in the page, it may look better. All of these things will be great to know and be aware of when we begin work on our group project web page. I think that in terms of web design we will be able to have more visually appealing and effective pages because we will have the opinions of more than just one person to work with. Along with our own ideas, we can work with the "editors" and use their knowledge of good design.
In the other article, "Basic design principles for non-designers", I appreciated the fact that the author choose to outline four basic principles. I think that this will stick with me because it will be fairly easy to remember. It will also come in handy later, for non web published pieces. I think some of the same aspects are important in personal documents too, such as resumes and cover letters. I like the fact that the authors emphasize the idea of eliminating anything that is just extra and not necessary, I think pages that look the most professional and are the most easily read are those that do this. The reading also brings up small, easy ideas that serve to make the page much better. For example, I never thought that just moving titles and captions closer together could look much neater than if you doubled spaced them out. This idea is explained in the proximity section. One of my pet peeves is when I have to scroll around on a page to be able to tell what information is important, so I was glad to see that no scrolling is the professional way to go. I hope that maintaining continuity of appearance of our group project web page will not be a problem, considering we will most likely be assigned to different portions of the reporting. I am thinking that maybe the best way to be sure of this is to all work together on one computer, or have one person lay out all of the pages so that they look like they belong together.