The Web Designer's Roadmap

Chapter 2It Ain’t Over Till It’s Over: A Bit of Design History

I know what you’re thinking: “Aargh! Don’t bore me with history! I got enough of that in school.” I can hardly blame you; I’ve never been a fan of memorizing lists of dates or the names of people long dead; it’s hard enough remembering phone numbers. Still, knowledge of history benefits us by putting everything we do as designers into context. Every day that we create design, we place ourselves into the timeline of art history. All the decisions that we make are colored by the work of our predecessors. We employ a set of principles and accept them as the norm. We take these principles to be self-evident, but that wasn’t always the case. Do you know that we design in an era of Postmodernism? ...