Andy Clarke - Art Direction for the Web

Andy Clarke is a well-known designer, design consultant, and mentor. Hes been called plenty of things since he started working on the web. His ego likes terms such as Ambassador for CSS, industry prophet, and inspiring, but hes most proud that Jeffrey Zeldman once called him a triple-talented bastard.

With his wife Sue, Andy founded in 1998, where theyve helped companies around the world to improve their designs by providing consulting and design expertise.

Andys written several popular books on website design and development, including Hardboiled Web Design: Fifth Anniversary Edition (Smashing Magazine, 2015), Hardboiled Web Design (Five Simple Steps, 2010), and Transcending CSS: The Fine Art Of Web Design (New Riders, 2006). Hes a popular speaker, and gives talks about art direction and design all over the world.

Andy tweets as and really, really loves gorillas.

lives in Bristol, UK. Shes one half of web development company edgeofmyseat.com, the company behind Perch CMS. Shes also editor-in-chief of Smashing Magazine, an Invited Expert to the W3C on the CSS Working Group, and a Google Developer Expert. Her day-to-day work can include anything from product development to dev-ops to CSS, and she regularly writes about all of them.

is a professional editor, copy editor and proofreader based in Birmingham, UK. Owen has experience of working with small, independent, and digital publishers, from manuscript to print and digital editions. His particular expertise encompasses all aspects of front-end web design and development, and hes worked with many well-known authors from the web industry.

https://stuffandnonsense.co.uk

https://twitter.com/malarkey

https://rachelandrew.co.uk

http://fullcreammilk.co.uk

Art direction has been part of advertising and print design for over 100 years, but on the web art direction is rare and there have been few meaningful conversations about it. This might be because weve been fixated on designing digital products. It may be because weve been preoccupied with making websites responsive. It might simply be that many designers and developers were never taught about art direction. In this book Im going to explain art direction, what it means, why it matters, and who can do it.

Art direction can help you improve engagement and encourage customer retention. It connects your brand with an audience, improves conversions and brings your customers journeys to life. In this book, Im going to show you how. Ill also explain how art direction can maintain brand values and design principles by connecting touch points across marketing, product design, and websites.

This book is for web designers and developers who want to understand art direction and how to make it work for digital products and websites. Its for businesses that want to make designs which engage audiences, and for experienced art directors and designers who work in print, who need to understand how to take their talent to the web.

What I describe is as relevant to people who design websites running on platforms like Shopify or Squarespace, as for those who handcraft every aspect of a digital experience. Its as appropriate for people who design complex and multifaceted digital products as for those who create websites to help market them.

Ive written for developers who want to collaborate with designers more effectively by teaching design principles so they can implement designs on any platform, from template-driven systems like Wix or WordPress to handwritten code. The art direction principles I teach also apply as much to people who use libraries like Bootstrap as they do to those who start every project by defining a bespoke grid.

Ive written for other writers too, people who want their words to be more than as my friend once said filling for rectangles.

Ive written for people who lead marketing or product teams, or run businesses, and who want their stories to be more effective at communicating, persuading, and selling.

I also wrote Art Direction for the Web for me because, quite frankly, Im weary of seeing websites that feel soulless and look identical to one another. I hope this book can help change that.

The content of this book is based on my twenty years experience of working with clients, plus the expertise of the art directors and designers I interviewed. I learned an incredible amount from talking with them, and I hope that through this book you will too.

http://brendandawes.com

Nearly ten years ago, my phone rang, and it was Andy Clarke. My Paravel cohorts and I had recently published an infographic-heavy website devoted to our love of cinema. We pulled out all the stops, and we were pretty damn proud of our creation. Having pushed ourselves with layout, typography, and illustration to see what we were capable of, we were still unsure if our peers would think it was, well, cool. Would they get it? Would it resonate?