Don’t make something unless it is both necessary and useful, but if it is both necessary and useful, don’t hesitate to make it beautiful.
Above is a quote attributed to the Shaker furniture makers. My good friend Josh Porter shared it with me along with his feelings about craftsmanship. Last night Josh made a great presentation to Boston’s Markup & Style Society about craftsmanship as it applies to web design. It’s something we in such a fast-changing industry and market may overlook from time to time.
I think it’s time we took a little more pride in our creations. To design them with care and thoughtful details, as if they were going to be around longer than we tend to think about web sites existing.
The reason I felt compelled to start my graduate degree in Instructional Design is because I felt there wasn’t a lot of good web software for education. What was there showed very little dedication to quality design. Tools have been made and sold, but I don’t see a lot of passion poured into most of these projects.
For my first contribution, I will be contributing to the Social Media Classroom project with Howard Rheingold and Sam Rose. I’ll be working on some of the interaction design, information architecture and visual design. It’s still early in the project, but I’ll keep you updated when we have things to show off.