Beef up your gutters and put your columns on a diet

Thumbing through the UK version of WIRED magazine the other day made me realise that online there is very little experimentation or use of quirky or edgy layouts like we see in print. What I mean by this is most layouts online tend to be safe. They express a certain conservative nature with uniformed gutter sizes and content columns of same or similar width. They don’t evoke any emotion. Reading WIRED provokes emotion; each article has its own identity and style related to the content. One column may be far slimmer than the next with a gutter between them that you could drive a tank through.

Guilty M’ Lord. I employ such conservativeness in my online designs too. Scouring other websites for inspiration only, without input from other disciplines or stimulus from the world around us can be an awful trap to fall into. Too many designers appear to be doing so and it is now the occasion to call time on this practice. Web design is such a young discipline, don’t play it safe – do as great graphic designers have done before us. Experiment. Create harmony, create conflict, and whatever you do be creative.

I plan to experiment more with typography and layout. Firstly I will be digging out my old graphic design books, possibly buying some more and replicating some of the layout techniques in HTML and CSS. Web designers will be aware that technical restraints can give us limitations that print designers do not face (they have their own set of restraints). It will be a task of experimenting with what can be achieved in layout with HTML and CSS, exploring that edge first. And then reigning it in to what can be achieved with considerations of browser deficiencies, optimal screen resolution for audience majority and how layout sits within the heuristic factors an interface should abide by.

There is no reason why good layout cannot be used commercially, in a content managed system or otherwise. So why have so many, me included, been playing it safe for so long? I am going to push the boat out today and design an 80px gutter. Strike me down.

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Tags: columns, CSS, design, graphic design, gutters, HTML, layout, typography

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 29th, 2009 at 9:11 am and is filed under Web design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.