Peo­ple think that design is styling. Design is not style. It’s not about giv­ing shape to the shell and not giv­ing a damn about the guts. Good design is a renais­sance atti­tude that com­bines tech­nol­ogy, cog­ni­tive sci­ence, human need, and beauty to pro­duce some­thing that the world didn’t know it was missing.

— Paola Antonelli

It’s very true and we some­times for­get that design isn’t just the façade; It is some­thing that relies on it’s con­tent, on it’s infra­struc­ture, on it’s own idea of itself and where it belongs in the world. The true beauty of a design isn’t how it first strikes the eye, but more in how that first glimpse relates to itself, to it’s mes­sage, to the undy­ing IDEA it rep­re­sents. Sure it might be a design of a blog about teddy bears, but a really well designed teddy bear blogsite embod­ies it’s ideas into its design… Is it then safe to say you know what it is about before you con­nect with the con­tent? Or is the con­tent speak­ing through the design, liv­ing, breath­ing through it.

It is dif­fi­cult to under­stand this, espe­cially achieve this in the dynamic web design world. The idea of a liv­ing design has it’s roots in print…where all the ele­ments have a tan­gi­ble his­tory. The lead and tin of the let­ter cast is mined and puri­fied before care­fully poured into a del­i­cate mould, cooled and put in a case. Later it is placed care­fully into sequence and inked before being pressed gen­tly into the sur­face of a sheet of paper, which has it own life­time behind it before it makes it’s way into your hands.

On the inter­net, all we can tell his­tory wise is that “Gee this site took 5 sec­onds longer than the oth­ers to load.” Rarely do most peo­ple take a sec­ond to enjoy the sub­tleties of the work the designer put behind this ver­i­ta­ble piece of liv­ing art, unless they took no time at all and the site is a hor­ri­ble mon­stros­ity of crooked UX and poor plan­ning. Where is the con­nec­tion then? How much effort or skill or design is required? Can we just slap the con­tent on and be done with it? Maybe throw a pic­ture or 2 on? How do we give our web designs life.

No, the answer is NOT add flash or gif ani­ma­tions. The answer was always there, it is in the prin­ci­ples, the orig­i­nal ide­ol­ogy of design. Bal­ance equals breath, Pro­por­tion equals cog­ni­tion, Rhythm equals the heart­beat, Empha­sis equals voice, Unity equals emo­tions. Just because we are design­ing for the web doesn’t mean these can­not be fol­lowed, or do not exist, in fact I say it is more impor­tant now than ever to cul­ti­vate the prin­ci­ples into every process of design. You can not make a con­nec­tion through the wires unless you leave a lit­tle of your­self on the other end.

This is what I was think­ing about today, among a few other things while I packed for my move across town. Picked up a client for a quick job I’ll share with ya’ll over the next few weeks…here’s for hop­ing I can leave a bit of myself in the design and help the bagels have a voice of their own through my site. :-)

Here’s some inspi­ra­tion if my words were not enough :-)

Be sure to pop on by blogrolled friends for more design and inspirations!

Also, any­one know how to share up all my subs on my google reader?

Chris Trude

Chris is a twitter-head, blog­ger, and web/graphic designer by night, and an in-house graphic designer by day. Also hap­pens to be an avid prac­ti­tioner of awe­some­ness. Feel free to sub­scribe to my feed, or fol­low me on Twit­ter to keep in touch with my day to day.