"Web design is about mutability, difference, uncertainty. It’s about not knowing. Uniquely, it is a mode of visual design not about manifesting a form, but about anticipating the different forms something might take. To some it is unbearably perplexing, but to you and me it is a challenge to relish. Like the elusive giant squid, it is a seriously slippery customer."
Source: Quantity Queries for CSS| A List Apart, Heydon Pickering, March, 2015
Mind blown by Frank Chimero's web grains post
Source: The Web’s Grain — A view on designing for the web | Frank Chimero, Based on his talk at Webstock 2015
The web is forcing our hands. And this is fine! Many sites will share design solutions, because we’re using the same materials. The consistencies establish best practices; they are proof of design patterns that play off of the needs of a common medium
Frank has these really good examples in his post, you can even make sense of the scaling issues of images vs. text as describe here:
I’ll explain: as I change the window width, the image gets taller as it gets wider, because its proportions are fixed. The text, on the other hand, gets shorter as it gets wider since it has no fixed proportions.
... this contradiction is unavoidable and unsolvable, so the only choice is to recognize it as implicit to the medium, and devise strategies to manage it [my emphasis].
Back to the future, return to roots of the web
Most of the solidified techniques about our practice come from the natural ways of the web that have been there since the start. The answer is right there in front of us, in the website itself, and each step we take away from its intentions makes our creations weaker.
By the way if you want to go back check out A Dao of Web Design | A List Apart, John Allsopp, April, 2000 - a very prescient take on web design from the start of the century
Design appreciation often depends on the users understanding of the design constraints
With the Mona Lisa, we have fixed, uniform edges that can be planned for with a high degree of certainty and control. We revere and celebrate this painting because of that exquisite control.
If you are a web designer - you are a joiner
With the joiner, we have a different kind of beauty. It is an edgeless surface of unknown proportions, comprised of small, individual, and variable elements from multiple vantages assembled into a readable whole that documents a moment.
Also known as web design
Designing for screens
I tried to answer what it meant to natively design for screens. I said it was something I called flux—the capacity for things to change. This could be as showy as animation, but also as simple and fundamental as a spreadsheet sorting itself and showing new results. You can’t do that on paper. So, designing for screens is managing this change over time, and expressing it in clear, communicative, and powerful ways. [my emphasis]
The Edgelessness of the web leads to a need to collaborate more widely across organisations
Simply put, the edgelessness of the web tears down the constructed edges in the company. Everything is so interconnected that nobody has a clear domain of work any longer—the walls are gone, so we’re left to learn how to collaborate in the spaces where things connect.
Technology of Grace
My wish is simple: I desire a technology of grace, one that lives well within its role.
This interest in grace in technology and user interaction is similar to views expressed by Cooper Et. al. in About Face: the essential of interaction design, 4th ed, 2014.