Jason Santa Maria

I've never understood the programmers that write off design as fluffy stuff for the "creative" people who wear black turtle necks and berets. As if design was somehow beneath them, or as if it's wallpaper that you can plaster over a project once the code is written to "pretty it up".

To answer your questions:

Why are you interested in learning more about design?

Because I want to spend my career making people feel the way I felt when I first used an iPod. I picked the iPod here because it seems to be the stock example that gets trotted out whenever someone needs to reference good design, but you can replace it with whatever well designed product you like. We've all had those experiences in our lives where we use something new, and it makes something that was previously difficult easy. That's the kind of stuff I want to spend my time creating, and a sound knowledge of design is a means to that end.

What have you found confusing about design?

When and how to break the rules. I'm a fan of Robin Williams' Non-designers Design Book (http://www.amazon.com/Non-Designers-Design-Book-Robin-Williams/dp/0321193857), but as a consequence my projects can look a little sterile because I follow the rules exactly as she lays them out.

In contrast, if you go and look at something made by Jason Santa Maria (an outstanding web designer at the top of his game) (http://jasonsantamaria.com/portfolio/) you'll see he breaks a lot of the rules, and it doesn't matter. In fact, it often times…

Ever since I read Jason Santa Maria's article on his "rethinking" (http://jasonsantamaria.com/articles/a-new-day/) I've been thinking about doing something similar with my personal site, where the frequency of posts has reduced over time.

I agree with the comments here that the smashing article went overboard; what particularly annoyed me was the use of different colored words for emphasis instead of bold or italic. I kept thinking those were links and obsessively moused over them to check. In their overzealous sale of the idea I think they definitely missed the mark about how design should work with the content. This is exactly what Jason Santa Maria points out in his post.

He specifically mentions that he may not always have time or the inclination or possibly even a need to do something special for each post. If that's the case he has a great default template for such articles. I highly recommend reading Jason's original article of a more sane and reasonable version of the idea.

No doubt, but for 90 percent of the needs to build effective web communications (aka web sites), colored boxes, images, and text will do just fine... Especially with robust CSS3 support.

Care to list what a web design application really needs? It would be a big help. I've kind of referenced Jason Santa Maria's "A Real Web Design Application" article (http://jasonsantamaria.com/articles/a-real-web-design-application/) for some of my goals with my app...

Link: http://www.edit-room.com/

Maybe it will take some time to get there, but it's good to have goals, and incremental improvement is the way to go, at least for a solo developer effort :)

http://jasonsantamaria.com/ started using this format slightly before Dustin. I'm not saying anyone copied anyone else - just that it was probably invented multiple places.

And of course, before blogs took over the web, a separate design for every page was quite common. Look at JWZ's old "stories" pages for a particularly horrible example. :)

http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/toothbrush.html

http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/zombies.html

http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/license.html