Function as Beautiful as Form

After some recent research, it comes to my attention that with all of the new innovations in website design, some designers still refuse to see the point of common best practices. You are not the first designer to want to put the navigation in the bottom corner in a circle configuration. Fight the urge. People are used to the navigation going across the top, occasionally, down one side or the another – you put it somewhere obscure and a potential customer leaves the site out of frustration because your design ego said “let’s try something new and different.”

Sometimes you don’t need to teach an old dog new tricks because the ones he knows have been pleasing crowds for years.

Good looks can’t get you everything. Although the ugly girl’s motto, this phrase actually holds some truth in the world of creative design.

However new (and pretty awesome) techniques are being developed and used everyday. Techniques that not only add great design elements to a website, but make it function that much better. Take Colorzilla’s new Gradient Generator, for an example.  Using their super-easy GUI, multi-point gradients are created in CSS3 which means you can still use 3D effects but that don’t require an image to load.

Tools like these make it easier for designers (who are not developers) make a site look sharp without really having to know a thing about HTML5 or CSS3.   Furthermore, let’s build a better-functioning Internet. It’s simply function over form, not function instead of form. It takes priority not the place of. It’s our job to find the correct ratio of both.

So your client is ready to take their business online. They spent who knows how much money on that brand new website, all the bells and whistles, animations and widgets. They spent months looking over your shoulder on every aspect of the design, colors and images making sure it fit their brand and had just the right message. Did you listen to every demand they had, or did you take your years of experience into consideration to give them a website that will make  them money? Did you do a good job explaining that this is why it is laid out this way and how important function is? Is it just pretty, or will it maneuver customers easily to the checkout page?

Function is beautiful.

Ask yourself, what kind of designer are you?