Cha-ching! You can hear it now. Your customer’s final payment is almost coming and you can actually pay for that iPad you bought on credit before you started this project. You know, the one you said would change your entire design process. (It did. You now spend way too much time playing tower defense games).

Whether we’re refugees from the paper-pushing world, digital purists, or tree-hugging environmentalists, we web designers seem to have an unreasonably strong dislike for “hard copies”. But maybe printing your final revisions is just what you need.

Permanency

Are you REALLY done? Something about putting pages to ink gives you a mental signal that you better have dotted all your t’s and crossed all your i’s. (eh?) Printing out that final version helps you to pause with a subliminal gut check that you’re DONE done.

Change of Perspective

Whether you’re a designer or not, in this day and age chances are good you spend the better part of your day staring at a computer screen. Sometimes it helps to look at a design off-screen to catch inconsistencies and to re-do odd designs you dreamed up at 3am.

Consistency

Lay all your pages out on the floor or pin them up on a wall. The spread helps you take a look at your entire site at once. Wow! You really did all that. Take a step back and look to see if your site wraps itself in to one coherent design. Is there a page that now just looks terribly out of place? Better open that text editor back up.

You’re done! Don’t forget to recycle.

Dieter Rams is one of the most well known and successful industrial designers, known for his brilliant work at Braun for over 30 years. Rams followed the approach “weniger, aber besser” which translates to “less, but better”. To give you a deeper understanding of that philosophy, Rams is quoted as saying that Jonathan Ive and the team at Apple are the only company today that still follow what he believes are the core values of design.

At the age of 78, Rams says he doesn’t own a computer, but his Ten Principles for Good Design certainly apply a great framework for web design:

1. Good design is innovative.

Gone are the days of geocities websites. Thank God. Innovative web design evolves with and is developed with the latest in web technologies, such as semantic HTML, CSS3, and JavaScript libraries, with an eye kept on future technologies.

2. Good design makes a product useful.

A good website design serves as a purposeful portal. Whether it is a social portal or an information portal, good web design focuses on the usefulness of a site to an end user, while excluding any elements that may detract from the user experience.

3. Good design is aesthetic.

A site can be tremendously useful, but to keep traffic coming back, it needs “the look”. Even the extreme simplicity of a site like craigslist holds in itself an aesthetic beauty.

4. Good design makes a product understandable.

Good web design explains itself. Easy to use navigation and straight forward user interfaces are at the core of any good design.

5. Good design is unobtrusive.

Good web design is, for lack of a better word, moderate. Hot pink, 144pt article font certainly won’t keep your visitors coming back.

6. Good design is honest.

Hidden pay-per-click links and multi-page articles to increase pageview counts do nothing for the user, and certainly have no place in a good web design. A good web design does not manipulate users for the gain of the site’s owners.

7. Good design is long-lasting.

Good web design is timeless. A trendy design may bring a repeat customer back sooner for a web designer, but a long lasting design focuses not on fashion, but builds and helps carry on the legacy of a brand.

8. Good design is thorough, down to the last detail.

Web designers and design recruiters love to talk up “pixel-perfect design”, but there is some enduring truth to these industry buzzwords. Sharing a common canvas with comparable work from other artists, the little things matter big in web design. The right color for a checkout button or the proper use of white-space can turn a great site in to a horrible site.

9. Good design is environmentally-friendly.

The web is its own eco-system. From cutting down on bandwidth use, to preventing visual pollution, a good web design is web environment friendly. Clean code, cross-browser compatibility, and minimal resource requirements. That’s green web design.

10. Good design is as little as possible.

That 3 minute animated-Flash splash page to your website might be pretty cool the first time, but does it add to the experience of your site’s users? “Weniger, aber besser”. Less, but better. Words to live by.

Every now and then you find a gem out on the internet that is too good not to share. Sometimes those gems find you…

Last week I received an email with a subject “Saw Your Listing On Sortfolio” from a Mr. James Mitchell. Great start. A potential client using a great tool to find a designer. What followed in the body of the e-mail, however, seemed a little suspect.

The e-mail eerily reminded me of a Nigerian 419 scam so I googled our dear friend Mr. James Mitchell at Kensington LLC. The rest is comedic gold. Little did I know that James Mitchell is a bit of a local celebrity in Boston. In fact, he may be Boston’s Most Eligible Bachelor. But not really…

So it appears that in addition to being a self-made, self-proclaimed, A-list party host and gadabout (as the Boston Magazine article makes clear), James Mitchell is also the most prolifically unsuccessful bachelor we have ever encountered, and seems to have hit on practically every single woman we know, almost always in a comically inartful way.

I found that James Mitchell is known for throwing cocktail parties. These parties have a 23 section FAQ on Mitchell’s website KensingtonLLC.com. There are also a great number of outstanding articles on the site, such as his Girlfriend Job Description, Prior Relationships, and Technical Issues With Evite. I am also led to believe Jim may have been rejected from eHarmony. You can’t make this stuff up folks.

Now back to hiring a web designer. James Mitchell now works for The Counsel Connect Network. The Counsel Connect Network is a group of legal websites featuring topics such as toxic mold, hernia patches, and the ever popular and expensive keyword mesothelioma. If you’re a web designer looking for work I suggest you check out the 21 section job description. Don’t miss “Section R. Please Read“, a collection of 8 articles you should peruse before you apply and “Section T. If You Are Interested“, the 234 point questionnaire. (update: google cache for both of those.)

My special thanks to the 37Signals team for not only providing traffic to this site through Sortfolio, but also hours of endless entertainment.

People love fonts. People really love Comic Sans. God help us. If you’re a web designer perhaps you’ve asked yourself how many fonts you should be using on a given webpage? Google has a good tip attached to their Google Font FAQ.

Also keep good design principles in mind; most pages don’t need very many fonts.

So how many fonts should you use? Not very many.

My job requires that I not only stay afloat on the latest design trends, but also to dig deep in to some things like server administration and PHP development.  This sometimes requires reference materials and a lot of it.  Thank God for Safari Books Online.

Safari Books Online features nearly 10,000 titles, though the number of titles you can access often depends on what is licensed by your library card.  That’s right.  Your library card.

Here in San Francisco, the public library allows for online access to Rosetta Stone (why I have a card in the first place) and currently 3,669 titles on Safari Books.  You pay a lot of taxes.  You might as well get something out of it.

For SF Library Card Holders: The Safari Proxy.