KonzeptioNerd

Web design defined

Jeffrey Zeldman defines web design:

Web design is the creation of digital environments that facilitate and encourage human activity; reflect or adapt to individual voices and content; and change gracefully over time while always retaining their identity.

(A List Apart: Jeffrey Zeldman, Understanding Web Design)

That’s quite a way from “web developers make the web work, web designers make it look pretty” - which is the philosophy most web design studios today are still basing their department structure and approaches on.

I’d like to take another step with “adaptivity” and “change”. “Adaptivity” seems to imply that the system acts on its own accord. “Change”, in this context, appears to connote the same

But web design is a longterm committment, rather than a fire and forget stunt. Monitoring the environments we create and actively changing them to better cater to the needs of those who use them is at least as important and consequential as setting them up in the first place.

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