chapter 1

Splash Screen

WHAT DO DESIGNERS DO? Designers organize information, shape identities, and create memorable experiences that entertain while communicating. Increasingly, designers are performing these tasks on the World Wide Web (the Web, to its friends). If you’ve picked up this book, you’re either doing the work already, thinking of migrating to the field, or considering adding web design to your repertoire of existing services.

Whether you design websites full-time or just occasionally, you’ll be helping to shape what may be the most inherently profound medium since the printing press. The Web is vast, intrinsically democratic, and dripping with creative, personal, and business potential. Oddly enough, for something that gets used and talked about every day by hundreds of millions, it is also quite often misunderstood by practitioners as well as users.

Before you do anything drastic, such as buying “web software,” changing your career, or leaving that louse who is only pretending to love you, it makes sense to find out where you are going and what you will be dealing with. So let’s start by examining what the Web is—exactly.