Making the Web Work: Designing Effective Web Applications

Preventing Style from Messing Other Things Up

What’s dangerous about style is that it can—and often does—get out of control. In an effort to bring the aesthetics and precision of print to the medium of the Web, designers can unwittingly sacrifice the fundamental usability concerns of legibility and Web-wide consistency. In addition, the desire for novel or precise design solutions often leads to technical implementations that require excessive bandwidth, exhibit cross-browser incompatibility, or are generally unstable.

Any successful design solution must accommodate the basic limitations and constraints of the Web as a medium while being sensitive to users’ physical and cognitive needs, as they work to understand and use the application.