Why We Share Our Design Philosophy
Flashback. while being interviewed for that
recent BBC article I was reminded of how, since our beginning web
design efforts, we at Sun have shared our web design philosophy widely,
warts and all.
One first example was Jakob Nielsen's early AlertBox articles (like the
one on Why Frames
Suck), which originated on sun.com and now continue in force on useit.com/alertbox. Over the
years, we've also routinely posted our design learnings, like the lessons from
the early days on visual design and "buttonography." And, I still
love reading Rick
Levine's quaint original style guide even though we long since
retired it from our site (I guess it's a little too quaint these 11
years later).
The idea back then was that the web was a participatory experience,
where we should exchange our new learnings with one another for the
greater good of the net. Sun was founded with a profound obsession
about network computing, so it made sense to us that we should share as
much information as possible with everyone about what we were learning
about the net.
Today, we still share our design philosophy in places like this blog
(where thankfully I don't have to be as eloquent as Jakob), and on the newly updated Web Design Center
that explains the components we use on Sun's sites. Having this
component stuff available online is convenient for our vendors and
design partners, and it's a pretty interesting read for anyone
interested in building a component-based site. That's actually our
biggest design lesson of the last dozen years: Create great
designs, test them with your users, and once you have something good,
create well documented templates and components that all of your
publishers and content management systems can follow (and pray that
they don't just snarf HTML code directly off your live pages without
reading the specs!)
Tunes: 43: Spoon: The Beast and
Dragon, Adored
