The Rules of Design - in context
Regulars here will know that I frequent Andy Rutledge's website Design View.
Recently Andy wrote an article entitled ‘Rules and Context', an enlightening piece underlining the importance of intrinsic design rules, and how those rules can bend depending on the context in which they are used. A compelling read. But whilst I agree with him and his supporting examples in principle, I believe it's important to recognise that they are not always all necessary in practice, as Andy may appear to indicate.
His take on the rules of design are:
"If you don't obey the rules, your results will be boring, uninspiring, uncommunicative, and less than compelling."
A fair comment supported by a number of clear, concise examples (I owe him a nickel).
But the rules he speaks of state, for example, that a large quantity of text content is more difficult to read against a dark background colour, taking into account supporting imagery. Correct in theory yes. Correct in principal, yes. But to blatantly disobey them would result in a less-than-compelling design? No, I don't think so, not always.
Veerle's blog was considered by many to be groundbreaking; the outright king of blog designs in 2006. Personally I don't share that exact opinion, but I can respect it as a wonderful piece of design.
The site breaks the first rule Andy demonstrates, often presenting large chunks of text content in bright colours against a dark background, and occasionally with little supporting imagery. Does it look at all boring, uninspired or uncommunicative to you? It doesn't to me.
"A humans' visual attention is most efficiently captured with an image"
Perfectly correct. Images do attract the attention, and I know that Andy is pointing out only what should be obvious to us all. But it would be a mistake to misinterpret this as meaning you must use images else your design will ultimately fail. You don't necessarily need images to present and communicate information effectively. In the case of Garrett Dimon, you barely even need to design beyond the text content;
Not a true image in sight, yet again the website has communicated well and, as far as I'm concerned, is elegant and quite beautifully minimalist to boot.
The point I'm getting to is that whilst the rules Andy speaks of so passionately are certainly a good guide to follow I don't believe that the breaking of them, to a degree, will result in a visually poor, uninspired website that fails in it's attempts to communicate.
Stick to the rules for the most part - they will act as an excellent guide. But once you've grown to understand them and their place in design, they should be treated as nothing more than a guide. Don't be afraid to follow your instincts, even if they leads you from the beaten path. Trust your skills and make design-related decisions intelligently drawing on the knowledge you've gained through experience.
Rules will deliver great results, but it's often the breaking of them that will lead to a masterpiece.
02/04/2007 
8 Comment(s)
On 28/03/2007 Owen said:
That's funny Steve, when reading the same article I immediately thought of Veerle's blog and how it contradicted what he was saying.
I like reading his blog, but he can be extremely forthright at times, which often niggles with me.
Nice post.
On 29/03/2007 Dustin said:
Steve, your site seems like a good balance between images and code. It looks like you are using less than 5 images on your site for the design, which means all these fancy curves and such are done with the code.
I hate long load times, and if i can avoid them, then great. Having a lot of images usually makes a design look worse in my opinion.
On 30/03/2007 P.J. Onori said:
Nice article as always. I personally am not the biggest fan of Veerle's blog design - to which I am in the great minority. Still, as you said, one can respect it as a well-executed design. Design rules are very important as Andy point out - but there are always times they can and should be broken.