This morning Mark Boulton posted on twitter:

Premise: Web design is not a craft. Craft takes times. You can’t craft under a deadline. You don’t design for love. You design for money.

And it made me start wondering if Web design really was a craft or not.

My first port of call was Wikipedia and the entry on craft where I found this:

“Craft” as a classification

In English, to describe something as a craft is to describe it as lying somewhere between an art (which relies on talent) and a science (which relies on knowledge). In this sense, the English word craft is roughly equivalent to the ancient Greek term techne.

I think this describes Web design fairly well. Without the art side we’d get an entire Internet that looked like Jacob Nielsens usability site. Without some knowledge we end up with an entire Internet that looks pretty but is entirely useless.

Craftsman also seems to be closely tied to artisan, and again on Wikipedia I found this:

An artisan (from Italian: artigiano) or craftsman (craftsperson)^[1] is a skilled manual worker who makes items that may be functional or strictly decorative, including furniture, clothing, jewelry, household items, and tools or even machines such as the handmade devices of a watchmaker. An artisan is therefore a person engaged in or occupied by the practice of a craft, who may through experience and talent reach the expressive levels of an art in their work and what they create.

Okay so maybe my theory start to break down here, I really don’t think we can describe Web design as manual work. However if we look at the final sentence I think this could bring us back towards Web design again. As our skill as a Web designer increases we can move from the purely functional to something which expresses something too. I know that really it should be our client who is expressed in the site, but the reason some designers are so successful is that their work carries something of themselves too.

Finally I went back to Handcrafted CSS and this is what Dan says:

So, when I think craftsmanship, I tend to think that when something is well crafted, it reflects that a human was behind its design, a pair of hands carefully choosing the details that go into something well made and of high quality.

These details are not always obvious. With a well-made piece of furniture, you might not notice how well made it is until you start using it. Pull out the drawer and notice the dovetail joints, for instance.

All of this can be related to Web design. Seemingly nonobvious details that can often separate good Web design from great Web design. You might not appreciate the quality of a well-designed website until you start using it, looking under the hood, putting it through tests.

I totally agree with Dan about this idea of craftsmanship. I’m not sure now if craftsmanship is the same as Mark was talking about craft (I think it is but I wouldn’t want to misquote him).

I think that Web design can be craft, in the same way that making furniture can. Not everyone who makes Web sites is a craftsman.

But I think that you can be a craftsman and still be a professional Web designer. A craftsman worries about the details, what happens if more text goes in the is box, what happens if the text gets bigger or smaller. I think anyone who worries about things like this and writes most of the code by hand can call themselves a craftsman.

There are many Web designers churning out loads of cheap Web sites that don’t qualify as being a craftsman and because of the high turnover and low cost they can’t afford to craft Web sites. But I think that with a realistic budget and timescale we can take the time to craft Web sites. In fact I believe that any Web site that isn’t crafted will perform poorly and break when it encounters unexpected contact. In fact as we become ever more device agnostic it becomes even more important that our sites are well crafted to deal with every situation.

I’d love to read what you think.

When I first read an article by Andy Clarke (@Malarkey) about designing in the browser I thought it was a fantastic idea, and never looked back.

Why I like designing in the browser

There are 2 key things that make designing in the browser work so well for me.

The first is that I’m much more at home writing CSS than I am with a graphics editor. This means I can get things from my head to the screen much more effectively.

The second is that showing clients a preview in a real Web page instead of an image gives them a much better idea of the final design. Especially as they then see how it will look in their browser. That means much less questions about why they don’t see some of the progressive enhancements because they are using an old version of Internet Explorer. Of course there is nothing to stop you waiting until you’ve created a html version before showing it to clients, but that does add an extra step.

Of course designing in the browser has it’s downsides and Sarah Parmenter (@sazzy) recently blogged “I can’t design in the browser” on why it doesn’t work well for her.

Back to Fireworks

That brings me back to this morning. I’ve been looking at a new site design for the last few days and really not getting very far, I just couldn’t get the design right (or feel very inspired about it).

So I opened up Fireworks and pretty quickly made some good progress. I hesitate to say I nailed it until I show it to the client, but it’s certainly broken the creative block.

It doesn’t have to be one or the other

I think what I’ve learnt today is that like so many things there isn’t 1 true way. Next time you get a creative block why not try switching from your graphics editor to designing in the browser (or the other way around). It might not solve the problem but it might just help you get past the creative block (even if you quickly end up back in your preferred workflow).

I also wanted to add that I never go straight to my HTML editor (or Fireworks), my first design ideas always start on paper with either felt tip pens or a pencil.