I like your point about design and “art for its own pleasure.” Sometimes clients forget this, as do some designers. I’m fortunate to work with designers who rarely fall into this trap.

In any case I would like to point that the title of the article is a bit misleading or at least not totally faire.

To me the base for this conversation should start by establishing what “Web Design” means, and like any other “design” it should be more than what the eye meets.

I’ve been working as a graphic designer for a long, long time. I started in the early 80’s as a print designer and jump to the web as soon as HTML was a bit stable (Did that ever happened?). Although I’ve worked for a great part of my career as an interactive designer in a lot of projects that were more “eye candy” than anything else, I’ve grown to become quite of a student of the “art of design”. I call myself a very strategic designer, and really hate when I get to be introduced as the “guy who does the cute images and gets to make everything look nice”.

Because design is not about creating nice pictures, selecting colors or choosing a type, but it is about using graphical elements and design principles (did we ever heard about “Gestalt”?) to support the content. Helping to organize the messages so the user finds the info they are looking for should be the main goal for web design.

Of course nobody hates a nice looking dress, of course we buy with our eyes and of course emotion is a big part of a web experience (this could be the theme for a complete different article) and taking care of these is the designers responsibility too, but the final product will be a disaster unless the designer understand that he is not creating a piece of art for its own pleasure and ego buster, or simple aesthetics, but to serve the communicational needs of the project.

Bad design is as fast of a way to ruin a website, as it is bad objective planning, bad architecture, bad written content and bad programming. The big difference is that design is the first thing we see, and probably the only thing that a client (or any other non-expert) thinks to posses certain knowledge to criticize. They would not dare to mention a bad use of PHP, disastrous organization of content or even bad simple writing and boring content. That would be just too complicated for them. Let’s blame it on the bad color choice, or the horrible selection of stock photo.

As you, I try to ask the client why the web site exist, and most of the time their answer is: “I want an animated horse”.

Note: I apologize for my bad grammar. English is not my first language and I guess my strong accents still translates on my writing:P

@oak, the title doesn’t attack designers, it attacks design.

speaking as a hyper-sensitive designer, a lack of focus on any of the key elements of a project can derail it, not just design. poorly planned content, for example, or a failure of management to control client requests as deadlines loom. design gets the bad rap because it is in the design stage that the client is most heavily involved. I’ve yet to meet a client who really cares all that much about the build of their site if it operates properly. design is so much more subjective that it’s where most clients feel they can be helpful.

Congratulations on joining the blog. Great first article (even if the title unfairly attacks the designers).

Clients often lead with form over function, it’s as true in print as it is on the Web. But I think it’s more challenging on the Web because they focus on the things they can see. They look at other sites and they see shiny buttons and things that move. They think these look cool.

But when they examine such sites they’re doing so as though they were looking at a gallery display. They’re not approaching the site as if they were a real user trying to find information, apply for a program, etc. But you can’t judge the success of a site from looks anymore than you could judge a car without driving it or checking under the hood to make sure it has an engine.

In the end their hurting themselves. When they have to show results the following year it’s not enough to say everyone loves the look of the site. You have to show traffic and results. That only comes with goal-driven content.