Design Coming Full Circle
Posted by Chris | Filed under Design, Inner Thoughts
I’m not sure how or when it happened or who started it. I would blame M$ or Apple, but their websites aren’t the greatest. I’m thinking about blaming the French, just b/c it’s always easy to blame them.
I ran across this article about grid-based design and one line in particular caught my attention:
“Table layouts are great for grid designs. The markup itself reproduces a specific grid, and the tendency is for us to just fill up the boxes with the images, type, and interface elements that make up our design.”
[ Molly Holzschlag ]
bold is taken as is, but it
Clicking the link on her name took me to an article she wrote on A List Apart about Grid Design. Simply writing for ALA tells me that she knows what she’s talking about, so I’m not going to say she’s wrong. And, while I agree the grid design is clean and looks nice and is probably what I would use on a lot of projects, it amazes me that we’ve come full circle as designers. I got into web design fairly late in the game (it seems to me): ~2001 at the age of 19 or 20. Ever since, it has never been a job, but more of a passion or hobby. Back then, though, all I had was a pirated version of Dreamweaver and all I knew how to do was to draw tables in Dreamweaver’s WYSIWYG editor. But then, talking to a buddy who was also into design and subsequently being introduced to Stopdesign’s Douglas Bowman (not face-to-face, but my face to his website), I got into the world of tableless CSS. I’ve only been back to tables once since then and I don’t intend to go back ever.
However, the grid design almost seems to be begging us to come back to the tables. And I know tables aren’t gone forever, but wouldn’t it be great if they were. I used to be able to tell (and probably still can tell) which websites are made with MS Frontpage and which aren’t (most aren’t but Frontpage sites seem to just jump out and choke me). Frontpage has that same block, or grid, design to it. And again, this isn’t a bash on the grid design. It’s simply amazement that we go from tables to tableless to simulated tables.
Today’s grid designs are much more clean and neat and pleasing to the eye. But, theoretically, these designs could’ve been done very easily with tables. What’s next? Will Netscape make a huge comeback?
