Web Design and CSS1
If you are a graphic designer and deal with web design, one of the biggest issues of the past few years has been the creation of CSS.
What is CSS?…….. ‘CSS’ stands for ‘cascading style sheets’. It is a way to build websites, so websites load quicker on your screen, it reduces the source code of your website so it is better for search engine optimisation (SEO) and if you wish to change the layout of the site – its really quick and easy. Sounds pretty good, so why do graphic designers have a hard time with it?
The biggest issues with CSS from a graphic designers point of view, is that designs now need to created in such a way that they allow for this type of website build. In brief, the designers creative flare is compromised and all those lovely graphics and swirling curves, creative merging of images all have had to change to accommodate CSS.
This compromise is good as true web design is the bringing together of many mediums, for example programmers, SEO marketing experts and copywriters. Good web design needs to take account of the latest technology and can be achieved if they consider the other elements which makes a good website.
A commercially successful website can make a business, just as quickly as a poorly designed and created website will break a business.
That is why graphical web design, needs to take account of the latest technology and find a happy medium between being creative and the latest technology.
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May I completely disagree!…
In my opinion wider adoption of CSS in web development has encouraged better design practices, taking from the principles you mention (separating content and design).
CSS allows far greater flexibility for design, as well as quick iterations/changes without having to touch HTML. And with CSS3 on the horizon we can only expect to see even more creative designs utilizing features such as box-shadow, text-shadow, -webkit-gradient etc etc.
Take a look at this article, it talks about how some agencies are actually creating their design mock-ups straight into XTHML/CSS! – http://24ways.org/2009/make-your-mockup-in-markup