I feel there’s a whole generation out there, who’ve intuited and grown up with Photoshop and a battery of typefaces, but without every receiving the historical context to sew their experience into the greater whole, or any rigid methodologies guiding their practises.

As an educator, working in the field of web design education – and someone currently in the process of designing a new web design degree level course from the ground up – one of the key aspects that is missing in web design education is a firm grounding in historical, theoretical and contextual awareness.

All too often web design courses (at all levels) focus on the tools we use and spend very little time on the rich typographic and communication design history that our practise has evolved from. What’s great about this piece by Mr Chimero, and a great deal of the pieces Typekit are publishing here, is that they foreground some of the fundamentals of design that are a critical part of the equation.

Web design as a profession is maturing and to be a part of this industry at this time is certainly exciting. If we are to further develop as an industry, now is the time to focus on the ‘why’ as much as the ‘how’. We’re part of a long line of communication designers and we owe it to ourselves, and those embarking on a career in this industry, to impart the knowledge we can glean from those that travelled this well-worn path before us.

Your closing sentiment is an interesting one. I can think of many paintings (and other works) that have moved me. Of course I’ve also been moved by designs that exist within the static world of print and the more fluid world of the screen, but we need to set the bar higher, challenge ourselves to deliver more than surface and think long and hard about the fundamentals that, when put in place, deliver truly beautiful and memorable experiences.

Well to his credit Frank Chimero is taking steps in the right direction. I feel there’s a whole generation out there, who’ve intuited and grownup with Photoshop and a battery of typefaces, but without every receiving the historical context to sew their experience into the greater whole, or any rigid methodologies guiding their practises.

I know pure design argues that only anonymity in the elements we use to transcend self, and “the giving up of personal vanity (up till now falsely called “personality”)” are the goals to aim for. Form follows function; honour and serve the text, etc…

I feel a lot of early modernism worked because of the power of contrast; I imagine, an orderly, rational and clean design on white broadsheet, must have been MINDBLOWING against the rose and yellow jumbled messes that were the order of the day… cut through and contrast against the noise!

It served its purpose of the day, but I feel the pendulum is in constant swing. We use computers which divorces us from the human hand and live in a world of “neutral” san-serifs, themselves becoming an expression of a highly sensitive eclecticism. In contrast to the wall of accepted Helvetica, things that are letter-pressed, hand scripted, and flourished jump out as though they’re coming from left-field.

I think there are valuable lessons to glean from modernism, with regard to the construction of objects in obedience to their purpose. But, I think people are yearning for that emotive spark; that sense of uniqueness that is lost with this affected “neutrality”.

Food for thought; I’ve wept at paintings, but have never shed a tear for carefully organized and rational lists.

This adds to my confusion as to why F. Chimero is regarded as a design guru.. A talented illustrator? Yes. A gifted communicator? Absolutely. A savvy self-marketer? Oh wait.. that’s why..

As usual, a great post. You do open one issue though that I think is a difficult one to work with, especially if you are designing a new site, or refreshing an existing one.

That is, most content-rich sites are not / can not be designed as freely as a poster can. So you end up focusing on the micro-level formatting and hierarchy (the elements that will be reused from page to page), and with the overall visual balance those elements create when composed on the entirety of a page.

Maybe there’s a short series of posts here for you, taking us all down the path of a content site’s overall design by looking at it’s micro- and macro-level composition. I could see something like creating a fictitious news or magazine site as a great example.

You can just squeeze that in with everything else right? :p

Thanks again for this great post.

Exactly.