« Alan AtKisson on the Tällberg Conference | Main | Tim O'Reilly's big four »

Elements of Web Style

One of my most memorable teachers was the great Red Gibson, who did the lecture piece of my copy editing class at the University of Texas around 1971. Gibson taught a pragmatic economy of style that was critical discipline given my tendency, at the time, to capture undisciplined prose explosions on the page, thinking I had created poetry. Gibson taught me to appreciate discipline and structure in writing, and to pare down, then pare down again. The book he referred to as Strunk and White was required reading for the course... its full name, The Elements of Style by William Strunk, Jr., and E.B. White, a little book (around 100 pages in its current edition) used originally as a textbook for Strunk's class, before White revised and annotated it years later for publication as a textbook.

The last place I expected to find a reference to "the little book" was Boxes and Arrows, which (if you don't know it already) is a popular reference site for web designers. However site founder Christina Wodtke has written a terrific essayabout the impact of Elements of Style on designers, explaining why it's "the most commonly cited book" in "web design screeds." Wodtke is an excellent writer herself, and she extends parts of the little book very effectively into advice for web designers:

This is an easy translation into the design space—although you may have an impressive design style, make sure that your design is tempered to the needs of the project. A commerce site should probably not evoke gasps of pleasure at its beauty, but rather a sense of security, trust, a wealth of choice and appropriate prices.

You have a style and a way of working that is natural to you; to take on an unnatural style will result in a flawed product. Conversely your style is not necessarily suited to every project. Too often, because we are praised for our natural talent, we think that is all there is to design. But there is craft, there is understanding the product’s brand, and there is understanding not only conventions of the web, but conventions of the domain. Somehow one must balance our design nature with the environment of work.

jon posted this at 9:21 AM
Share on Facebook| email to a friend

 Subscribe to RSS feed for Weblogsky