Sexy Web Page Design

As I said in Chapter 1, aesthetics are what I consider to be the fun part of design. It's the part of the process that deals exclusively with making our project sexy!

It can be very easy, with deadlines looming and technical difficulties prevailing, to cut corners with aesthetics. But it's so important to do it properly, because that extra layer of care goes such a long way. The difference between good design and great design can often be subtle, but subtlety works on a subconscious level: people will be impressed by good design without knowing it, but great design will thrill them. They'll love what they see, and they'll come back for more. And with the whimsical, temporary, intangible nature of web design, it's so important to motivate your visitors to return.

Before we start, here's a quick word about the build stage: as you know, we're dealing only with design rather than code in this book, but it's still important that you consider how all of these design elements might be executed once it's time to develop the site--in case you create a design that's unnecessarily difficult to build. We'll be exploring this idea further in Chapter 6, but we'll also be keeping this in mind as we think of aesthetics.

A Small Introduction to Layout and Composition

Rather than go into detail about layout and composition theory, I will first refer you to The Principles of Beautiful Web Design,1 written by Jason Beaird (Melbourne: SitePoint, 2007). The book's first

chapter is all about composition, and it's available for free at SitePoint.2 If you're new to the web game, or even design generally, I'd recommend it as a good starting point.

Should you be concerned I'm going to send you off to Jason's book and put my feet up? Well, actually, there's still a lot we need to discuss! We'd started to tackle layout and composition already when we created our wireframes in Chapter 3. They were only very rough, though, helping us to work out element placement in a very loose sense. Now we'll be looking at page layout in a more precise manner.

Art and Design Traditions

There's a good reason that many of the principles used in art and print design have carried across to the Web. We've mentioned before that our primary focus is on making sexy web sites, and that's certainly most true when we're talking very specifically about aesthetics. So it makes perfect sense, then, to consider these traditional techniques.

The Golden Ratio

The golden ratio (sometimes called the divine propor­ tion) is a magical-sounding phrase used to describe an aesthetically pleasing way to