Aesthetic Design
Aesthetic design is all about getting the look right. If you are good at this it means you will be able to design sites that not only look good but are appropriately designed. Different designs convey different messages to an end user, so it's important that a design matches the site's message.
As a designer you have to cautious when trying to stay up to date with the latest trends. Designing a site for a Law firm that looks like it should be for a new rock band is something you never want to have happen, even if the design is great, the end result won’t be. This is why it's very important as a web designer that you don't simply follow fads and trends blindly. You must always be thinking not just how you can make a site design look good, but also look appropriate.
Out of the three components of web design, aesthetic design is surely the one that people most identify as being design. One thing I find interesting about aesthetic design is that it is deceptively difficult. I remember one time I did a album cover for a friend of mine who is a musician, he commented "oh it's just some squares and some different sized text, you must have done this in ten minutes" – ahhh I love being a designer!
Information Design
Information design is about preparing the information on a website in the best possible way, so that users can efficiently and effectively find and receive information. In larger sites, just finding information becomes challenging, but in sites both large and small, processing it is always a design problem.
If you’re like me you tend to skim through content on screen. So to help the viewer it’s a good idea to organize content with headings, subheadings and visual elements to help break up the content and make it easier to read and more interesting to look at.
But information design isn't limited to what's on a single page, it’s also about what structures you use to house the site's parts, like the menus, submenus and how pages cross link to each other.
Interface Design
Interface design is the overall makeup of how a user can interact with a site. The word interface means a point or surface where two things touch. So a web user interface is where a viewer and a website touch. So menus, forms, blogs, galleries and any other way you can interact with a website.
Our Toronto web design firm realizes that good interface design is about making the experience of using a website easy and enjoyable. It’s actually easier to notice bad interface, a great example of interface design is the use of icons. Have you ever looked at an icon on a website and thought "what is that meant to represent?" well it represents bad interface design.
