Design is not an art form.

The division of art against other fields has been fodder for philosophical debate. Having worked and trained as an artist and as a designer, I think I have a working definition, and one that is important for understanding the purpose and direction that the content herein takes.

An artists primary duty is to respect and articulate his personal impressions and inspiration. If the expression that results has resonance in a larger audience, that is added value. But the initial judgement for the worth of the creation has to first and primarily be made by the creator.

Design, whether graphic, electronic, programming or archictectural, has absolute, scientific measures of success that has nothing to do with the opinions of its creator. Some of these criteria may be pesonal and intangible, but many of them are observatioble and scientific. You can judge the worth of a building by how enjoyable it is to traverse -- however, many criteria are epressed in concrete building codes and blunt comonsense considerations. A home without a bathroom, no matter how elegant, is an absolute failure in the modern world. Similarly, advertising's final criteria is not the creativity it expresses, but the number of products it sells and the effect it has on the reputaion of the company that funded it.

My current focus is web design; while there are always subjective marks in the field, there are a lot of objective criteria at play.

• Can the audience find the content they are seeking? 
• Does the sites' theme communicate a feel for the industry of its produceer, or could it be applied to any other field without gaining or losing relevenace? 
• Can the resulting pages load in a reasonable time and render across different context or browsers?
• Does it index well against the leading search engines?
• Can you easily bookmark and return to a page?
• Can content be easily maintained and edited?
• How well does it include dynamic features that pull the audience in as participants? (The Web 2.0 benchmark)

And of course, the universal measure: is it a success at achieving the purpose for which it was built and does it measure up well against other playiers in the same field.

User Interface as a field of study is what I call a primitive art form. While there are always a little magic in any act of creation, there are always scientific systems of producing desired results; and while there are ample documentation about producing tangible results in web development, the science of visual design -- not how to produce a given result, but why one design approach, layout, or typograhic approach is more effective than another -- are much rarer. One can pursue the field without formal training, and even if you have it, its not likely to increase the level of respect because your vocabulary is not part of the common parlance even in professional circles.

It overlaps into the study of Cognition. I confess I've not quite "got" the science of Cognition, but there are many useful elements and data from studies, such as rules of thumb in short term memory,

Increasing awareness of the language and accomplishments of those who have done work in the field is therefore part of the responsibility of those who do pursue serious work in the field.Type and Design is a good example of a work in applying cognitive theory to produce applicable rules of systemic design

Towards that end, just as the "Gang of six" have promoted engineering visual design patterns, I am attempting to collect the fundamental rules of visual design, from sources like Tufte and Ogilvy, and some useful precepts I have picked up from other designers and non-designers, and publish them here for quick digestion.

Feel free to append anything useful in the commentary or forums, including reference and academic data.This has been an occasional but long running project of mine and I appreciate anyone with anything to contribute.

If you work here, you don't get a vote.

"You are not responsible for the tastes of your client." Every good whore knows this, and every designer learns it the hard way. I am reminded of a designer I worked with in Varian who developed the yearly investor report as a design. It was the only act of free will he commited that year. He created five options for the senior management, including one that he knew was ugly but whch, he figured, would make the others look that much better by contrast.

Guess which one went to print?

The fact that the ultimate arbiters of design are external to the creator doesn't mean you should cave to everyone in the company when it comes to layout; one of the things that ruins a design is when it becomes a balkanized, political patchwork of gerrymandered content, like a whorish racecar. No matter how well or how poorly the designer does his job, it seems as if everyone who is not a designer has a contribution to make. And it seems to me that the more tasteless and ham-handed the commentator, the more earnest their opinion is.

The best way to get a sense of where design should get is to speak to the end clients -- and their advocates, who are usually in the sales department. Note -- I dld NOT say the marketing department! Marketing people tend to be talentless and oblivious; avoid them like the plague. But sales people are the arteries of customer feedback, and keeping them happy is the key to keeping the product viable and responsive.

A designer's worst nightmare is to get trapped in a situation where someone else is "Puppeting" them over the shoulder. Do your best to collect specifications and work from them; forcing your colleagues to put their thoughts down in a tangible form at least gives you time to think. If you find their designs to be unrealistic, satisfy them, then go in your own direction in an alternate context. You might not be able to win over their ego, but at least you have a portfolio item.