Posted by Naveed on October 14, 2008
Filed under: design

My most favorite task at Careeb is web design. I like it much more than writing fancy Ajax or Javascript code or designing a short and powerful PHP function. When I get into design work I spend hours at a stretch, but never does it feel boring or burdensome.

Joshua Porter, a web designer has crafted 5 web design principles. One of them is “Great design is invisible“. Joshua hits the nail in the head with this one. It is absolutely true that great design is invisible. We take it for granted and it looks obvious.

Me and Imdad felt exactly the same thing while coding the search and sorting functionality in the Contacts and Browse Network Members pages. So much effort and work goes into designing a good user interface but at the end of the day it all looks obvious and natural.

More from Joshua:

“An interesting property of great design is that it is taken for granted. It works so well that we forget that creative effort was involved to bring it about. Sometimes, like with the lowly spoon, the object is so simplistic that it seems obvious, and we disregard that at one point in history it wasn’t. Other times, like with the automobile, the object is so sophisticated yet easy-to-use that we’re blinded to the fact that millions and millions of human-hours went into getting it to this point. That’s a shame…every great design has a rich history. And every design has behind it a designer or designers who tried to make the world a better place by solving some problem or another.

Bad design is obvious because it hurts to use. It is awkward, difficult, and complex. In a great irony of the world, bad design is much easier to see than good design. It raps us on the head like a bully. Because of its success, great design is often invisible.”