What makes a web design work?

Tough question. Two answers this morning.

First up is Joshua Porter, a web designer who happens to be here in our home town of Newburyport:

... as a web designer, there is no analog to “look at this logo and see how it stands for a company”. That’s relatively easy for graphic designers because we can quickly appreciate the way a logo graphically depicts some attribute of the company: “solid, blue, Big Blue, trustworthy”. Even if we don’t like the company or if its never done anything good for us, we can make this judgment of the design of the logo.

But in web design, we can’t pass such sophisticated judgment on a design without having an actual experience with the web application itself. Without actually experiencing the value first-hand, we can’t look at a web site and say “hey, that web site is well designed because it represents the company well”. This is the primary disconnect when talking about judging great web design. You’ve got to experience it in a real way to know if it is great.

Read the full discussion in his blog: Do Canonical Web Designs Exist?

Second is one of A List Apart's two articles this month, by Jeffrey Zeldman. Again I'll excerpt waht I consider to be a key section:

Web design is not book design, it is not poster design, it is not illustration, and the highest achievements of those disciplines are not what web design aims for. Although websites can be delivery systems for games and videos, and although those delivery systems can be lovely to look at, such sites are exemplars of game design and video storytelling, not of web design. So what is 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.

Read Zeldman's article Understanding Web Design at ALA.

So... Good web design isn't static. It is the experience of using a design — which is really a system — that reveals whether it is good.