“New Thinking for a New Medium.”
This phrase was our mantra as a handful of us built the first version of HotWired. It was the fall of 1994. Netscape had yet to ship its first browser, Yahoo lived on a server at Stanford University, and 9,600 bps was a respectable speed for surfing the Web from your Quadra.
It’s been four years since we sweated over our first Web page designs in a cramped San Francisco loft, and we’ve learned a tremendous amount about how to do what we do. It seemed only natural to collect and rigorously evaluate our principles for Web design.
While we’ve continuously explored and explained our craft within the pages of Webmonkey, we’ve also decided to create a manifesto of sorts in print. The book, HotWired Style: Principles for Building Smart Web Sites, represents the accumulated knowledge of the designers and technical magicians of this site and embodies our desire to remake the Web in the form of a completely new and unique medium.
The pages linked below are an introduction and companion to the ideas and techniques in the book. Consider it an electronic proclamation of the fundamentals of Web design, or a historic marker for the state of the art today. It’s not a technical introduction to the process of Web design (although we link to several utilitarian Webmonkey articles). Nor is it an academic screed written from the Ivory Tower. The collection is written for any Webmonkey – from the sysadmin who needs to throw together an intranet to the experienced designer who pushes the cutting edge. Quite simply, these are the principles that guide us.
And if the Web’s insane rate of growth and unrelenting change has taught us anything, it’s that we are only scratching the surface of what is possible. As we continue to explore, we continue to refine.
Embrace the Technology
The heart of design is communication: defining a problem and creating a solution that balances pure information with an aesthetic that gives the message voice. The tension between form and function is the starting point for our exploration of Web design.
Almost immediately after the first graphical browsers shipped, a division appeared between what we’ve called the “structuralists” and the “presentationalists.” HTML was designed in 1992 specifically as a semantic markup language, with few layout capabilities. The underlying philosophy was that you could mark your content with descriptions – this is a headline, this is a quoted passage, etc. Then any machine in the world could interpret those tags in an appropriate way, leading to the universality of the Web as a way to distribute content.
But then the Web got really popular.
As soon as HTML began to enter the mainstream, people (notably browser companies) began to extend the language in proprietary ways to accommodate designers accustomed to having control over design and layout. They wanted control of color, fonts, and images. Solutions like the
