Chapter 8: Graphic and Layout Bloopers

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Overview

Our final category of Web bloopers includes graphic design and layout bloopers. These are mistakes in how Web-page components appear and where they are placed. They are about presentation rather than functionality.

Graphic design and layout bloopers-and how to avoid them-could fill a book all by themselves . There seems to be an infinite number of ways to mess up the presentation of Web content and controls, and Web designers have stumbled across many of them.

However, graphic design and layout issues are already well covered in other Web-design books. Many focus exclusively on that, as if there were nothing else to Web design. In this book, graphic design and layout is only one aspect of Web design. I left it for last for two reasons:

  1. Usability focus. This book focuses on usability. Graphic design and layout can affect a site's usability but more often affect users in other ways, such as brand-recognition, organizational image, aesthetics, and trust. Regarding such issues I am no expert and defer to people who are (Flanders and Willis, 1997; Flanders, 2001; Mullet and Sano, 1995).

    click to expand
    Bill Griffith. Reprint with special permission of King Features Syndicate.

  2. Easy to fix. Graphic design and layout bloopers are right out on the surface. Once recognized, they are typically easy to fix compared with other types of bloopers. This makes them somewhat less important than bloopers whose roots extend into the site architecture and back-end servers.

Even with a focus on graphic design and layout bloopers that affect usability, there were far too many candidate bloopers to include them all. Those that made it into the book are the ones that (1) affect users the most and (2) for which good examples had been found.



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Web Bloopers. 60 Common Web Design Mistakes and How to Avoid Them
Web Bloopers: 60 Common Web Design Mistakes, and How to Avoid Them (Interactive Technologies)
ISBN: 1558608400
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2002
Pages: 128
Authors: Jeff Johnson

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