Jeffrey ZELDMAN have a very interesting article at Adobe Motion Design Center about Style Versus Design.
Many young web designers view their craft the way I used to view pop culture. It’s cool or it’s crap. They mistake Style for Design, when the two things are not the same at all. Design communicates on every level. It tells you where you are, cues you to what you can do, and facilitates the doing. Style is tautological; it communicates stylishness. In visual terms, style is an aspect of design; in commercial terms, style can communicate brand attributes.
I really agree with many points that Jeffrey is talking about, Style is aspect of design that’s sure ! But what generally designers miss while creating website’s design is that they focus on design rather than style. Content generally is still not that easy and pleasant to read. Designs are full of image and take time to load, or boring without style and you’ll fastly loose interest into reading.
I think it will be more interesting if designers focus on the different aspect of the website, visibility, accessibility, brand, readability, in addition to the different technical feature that we can implement today to make reading from a website a pleasure such fonts, colors, presentations, naviguation … etc.
Most of all, I worry about web users. Because, after ten-plus years of commercial web development, they still have a tough time finding what they’re looking for, and they still wonder why it’s so damned unpleasant to read text on the web—which is what most of them do when they’re online.
And by the way if you check the article from Adobe website you’ll notice something interesting which is the marriage between Flash, HTML and PDF to present the content. Simple presentation, accessible and following the design and style of the Adobe website and products. Notice also that the article is newly published, but it was originaly written by Jeffrey five years ago on 2000, nothing really changed since that time !
