Designing for New Media

1. Designing for New Media How to Recognize Good and Bad Design

2. New Media Design Vocabulary In her excerpt, Robin Williams writes about how to recognize (and avoid) bad web design.

3. New Media Design Vocabulary In her excerpt, Robin Williams writes about how to recognize (and avoid) bad web design. She identifies four principles: Contrast, Repetition, Alignment, and Proximity.

4. New Media Design Vocabulary As a memory aid, a better way to remember these four principles, might be:

5. New Media Design Vocabulary As a memory aid, a better way to remember these four principles, might be: CRAP.

6. New Media Design Vocabulary

7. New Media Design Vocabulary Contrast is, of course, “contrasting elements” that are designed to help “guide your eyes around the page, create a hierarchy of information, and enable you to skim through the vast array of information and pick out what you need.”

8. New Media Design Vocabulary Repetition aims to “repeat certain elements that tie all the disparate parts together.” Each page in a web site should look like it belongs to the same website, company, concept.

9. New Media Design Vocabulary Alignment, simply enough, means that “items on the page are lined up with each other.”

10. New Media Design Vocabulary Proximity refers to “the relationships that items develop when they are close together, in close proximity.”

11. New Media Design Vocabulary Williams uses lots of examples to demonstrate when these principles are working well and are working not so well.

12. New Media Design Vocabulary Williams uses lots of examples to demonstrate when these principles are working well and are working not so well. It’s always a good place to start by observing when things go horribly, horribly wrong.

13. New Media Design Vocabulary Let’s start off with thisoutrageous example. Check this out. In terms of the four principles, what isn’t working here?

14. New Media Design Vocabulary Unfortunately (or fortunately) often web design issues are a bit more subtle. Let’s look at the Twitter home page today.

15. New Media Design Vocabulary Now, we’re going to continue puttingthese terms and skills into practice by seeking out other websites that do (or don’t) use these principles successfully.

16. New Media Design Vocabulary I would like each group to seek out a series of different websites—sites that demonstrate the successful use of a design principle and a less-than-successful use of a design principle.

17. New Media Design Vocabulary Since Williams identifies four key principles, you’ll need to find eight examples. I’d like each group find examples of sites that both successfully and unsuccessfully employ Williams’ four design principles: alignment, proximity, repetition, contrast

18. New Media Design Vocabulary More importantly, I’m going to ask you to articulate WHY these websites are (or are not) successful. The better your are able to write about what constitutes good or bad design, the better you’ll be able to apply that to your own work, especially for Project Two.

19. New Media Design Vocabulary I’d like to you then write a few sentences for each example, explaining why your group thought that this was successful or not.

20. New Media Design Vocabulary When your group has found, discussed and written about your websites, I’d like each group to share your findings with the class.

21. New Media Design Vocabulary Good luck and have fun!

22. Designing for New Media How to Recognize Good and Bad Design