Style

I read the article “The Role Of Illustration Style In Visual Storytelling” by Thomas Bohm on the “Smashing Magazine” website. This article is about the importance of the style of your visuals in web development. After a brief discussion of this, Bohm gives several examples of different illustrative styles, highlighting their strengths.

In the article there are many different styles of illustration showcased. Bohm gives a wide range of potential styles so that designers reading this can be aware of many of their options and be able to choose a style that fits their design.

A chart showing examples of different illustrative styles.

(Design by Thomas Bohm)

A chart showing examples of different illustrative styles.

(Design by Thomas Bohm)

This is a concept that design majors are taught early and reinforced often. We are taught the importance of identifying our needs in any design and choosing a style most suited to these needs. This is the primary topic of this article. This is clearly the primary goal of the article, in Bohm’s own words:

“Good illustrations create a mood and bring to life ideas and concepts from the text. To put it another way, visualisation. Good illustrations can also help give life to information in a better way than just using text, numbers, or tables.”

Bohm is writing this in order to assist web designers in picking the style for their illustrations.

Audience

Another main point in their article is the concept of identifying your audience. In doing this, a designer can more accurately develop their design to anticipate their user’s needs and address them. This is only briefly discussed, but it is another crucial design principle. No matter how good it is, your design cannot appeal to everyone; Any attempt to is fruitless and will result in less engagement than had you just determined your primary audience and focused on designing for them.

While not something focused on, in this course we have ultimately been learning about how to use HTML and CSS in order to achieve these two principles. We have learned to do a wide range of styling and most projects will not require all of it. This is so that we are able to anticipate what our design needs, and design for those needs.

Reflecting

In the video “Why Is CSS So Weird?” Miriam Suzanne speaks about a related concept regarding CSS’s core principles. That being: CSS is designed for you to define what you want your design to be for your core audience and make sure it is accessible to everyone, and that it remains compatible for as long as possible.

This course has been wonderful and taught me quite a lot about HTML, CSS, and web design as a whole. I feel like a whole new world of design has been opened up to me and I feel like I truly get a lot of the information. I have recently started helping my friends with learning some of the basics of HTML and CSS since they seemed interested in what I was learning. Overall I will take all of this web design knowledge with me further into my design career.