Zo’C » Transcending CSS, the fine art of web design

I have just finished reading Transcending CSS by Andy Clarke, one of the best readings I had so far on Web-related matters.

The book does assume you know a good amount of CSS, not a single paragraph is spent explaining how selectors and rules work, so it is not suitable for beginners keen to wet their feet on the waters of CSS. Yet, as the most part of the book is not quite technical, it also doesn’t requires you to be a CSS wizard.

Transcending CSS, as the title properly says, is not about CSS, it is about going beyond, it is about Web Design, a term that is in everybody’s mouth, but not necessarily in a meaningful way. It is about getting to the end of the road and start paving where Web Design will follow in the future.

The Web is not much older than a decade and yet its impact on the world as we see it has been so profound that the complexity it acquired requires all talents that can be gathered.

Programmers, designers, marketeers, writers, editors, photographers, visual artists, businessmen. All of them have niches on the web world, or the web industry, as you prefer regard it.

In many ways, Web Design is like Industrial Design. Both aggregate a lot of expertise areas, both have a design aspect, a technical aspect and a commercial aspect, but more deeply, neither one fit well in any of the areas that compose them.

You can’t just have a generic designer to handle the complexity of Industrial Design. Producing pieces to be produced and sold in great scales is a task that transcends design itself. You can’t have just a businessman or an engineer either.

Cars, chairs, refrigerators, sanitary pieces, kitchen cabinets, pens, computer monitors, cigarette boxes. All those things may seem very different, but they have something in common.

Despite the different designs, uses and technologies involved, all of them share the same strategic concerns: the optimization of the process, a broad market as a target, two perfectly separated parts of the process that are the design, and the production.

Even being Industrial Design a gather of different areas of knowledge for a specific purpose (eg. Producing objects in series and great amounts) it has emerged to become a discipline on its own right.

An Industrial Designer, being trained in so many different areas related to the same process, creates a synergy you won’t have by just joining an expert from each area.

The synergy of being able to make links between several different areas in a single mind is what creates this kind of Transcendency and eventually a new area is created to allow it to become mainstream.

This is how Quantum Computing was created (that is, if we can say it actually exists). You don’t create Quantum Computing by joining a Physicist and a Computer Scientist, you need to combine both on a single mind and this was also true for Industrial Design and, well, Web Design.

As well as Industrial Design, Web Design spans over many knowledge areas, but putting together a programmer, a designer and a businessman won’t just create the web, nor will make it walk huge steps.

Tim Berners-Lee, father of the World Wide Web and originally a Physicist, had this kind of synergy in order to transcend like this, but it was necessary to have a lot more people to take the web where it is today. While he is the inventor of the World Wide Web concept, the web as we know it is the effort and vision of many men and women.

Unhappily, many people (I’d dare to say most) who develop for the web are falling behind. They feel and act like the goal is to know what is around and to develop towards the standards already set. Some even feel their niche lays on an intermediate quality of the wide range living today in the web.

Anyone who thinks like this is already obsolete! It is possible to have a career on the web for some time, but soon will be just lost. It will be like trying to be a typewriter repairman today: nothing shameful, but very hard to make a living out of it.

I don’t know exactly where the web is going, nobody knows for sure, but one thing is certain: in just a couple of years, it will be nothing like it is today and nobody will be able to stand proud and well with just what is known right now.

Good Web Designers today are people who come from different areas of knowledge and, out of passion, have spanned over others to work on this thing we call Web Design, but there is still a long path ahead.

If you go to your favorite bookstore, does it have a Web Section? Frequently there isn’t anything more specific than Computers & Internet Category.

I wonder why not having a “Design and Internet” category, a “Business and Internet” category or even an “Arts and Internet” category.

Almost every skill around Web is borrowed from a different area, but still, there are contexts in which its best classification is Web related.

Web Design has to (and will) establish itself as a discipline on its own right, it will be taught in universities and will have an area on bookstores, just like Industrial Design has.

Relating Web Design to computers is becoming as silly as relating any other area. Many business today live only in an electronic form and still, would sound silly to see marketing books on the computer section side by side with C and Java books. Just because the web only exists inside computers it doesn’t mean that Web Design books properly share a shelf with them.

The Web is a broader concept now, and it will become even broader in the future, it must not be confused with the technologies it relies upon.

Transcending CSS, by Andy Clarke is one of these books that just don’t properly fit in any of these bookshelves of today. It is a book about understanding the web in a broader, not necessarily technical, way and push you to think about the future Web Designers are creating for this new discipline as we speak, and to contribute to build it.

Andy Clarke’s work is a textbook for this Web Design discipline that, despite the importance that it already has in the world as we see it, it is still in its early days. It may seem Madness, but is actually One Step Beyond.

Get it from Amazon