Good design

For one, I completely relate to Jannelle’s issue of an important website being pretty terrible. My experience with the Washington Gas site has been miserable!! It shows that design truly is important, and something we all must think about as we move forward.

As I was reading about design, I saw a list of four things good graphic design does. These things are:
1. It captures attention.
2. It controls the eye’s movement across the page or screen.
3. It conveys information.
4. It evokes emotion.

Although this list seems pretty “duh”, it really stuck with me as I read that design really isn’t that much different than what we do as historians. Those things on the list–we do them with writing. As historians, we build an argument and a story using the resources available to us. As digital historians, we must think of building in much different ways. I, in particular, felt that the Stanford Web Credibility Project will be very useful for us to utilize when we create our own projects. Much like historians use the old method of peer-reviewed journals and academic presses, this can be our new guide of how to tackle design for our projects.

This week, I commented on Kirk’s blog.