Concept Design

Why concept design works.

A concept allows us to take in a broad view of things. Take the concept of fruit for example. Fruit has many characteristics. First off there are many different general types of fruit.
You can break these types of fruit down into shape, form, and color. This is just the visual reference. Fruit also appeals to your other senses. They each smell different, they feel different. You might associate fruit with your memories, going blackberry picking in the mountains.... or making fruit pie's with your grandmother. In design it
is important to start out with a general concept such as this because it allows you to explore things you would have never imagined doing. Making things very broad in the beginning gives you the opportunity to be extremely creative, especially within a group of people. If you have a group of designers trying to design something happy as opposed to something to do with the victorian era, the designers trying to make happy designs are not going to be very successful or "happy" themselves.

Because a concept brings in elements of an unpredictable nature the outcome of this process is always much more interesting. When you have a series of parameters that need to be met in context of a concept your resolution will take on a form that is unexpected.

The most important thing a concept truly does is to uncover alternate solutions for design problems, in both an artistic and engineering sense.

A concept is like a species. There are so many interacting counterparts that make up its essence it cannot ever be completely defined as one thing. That is why a concept is so attractive. A concept is more like something you can wear just for a little while, but you can never own it. A concept cannot be bought, it forms on its own and if we are paying enough attention to the world around us we will notice it.

A concept enables designers to unite as one in their vision. Without it all direction and inspiration is lost.

CSS vs HTML

There are those that are attached to the old way of doing things, and don't want to let go of their simple html roots, then there are those that evolve with the change.

If  you are still designing your websites in plain old html you might want to think about the opportunities in design that you are missing out on.  It is generally accepted by many that the only thing CSS is good for is search engines.   CSS makes it is easier for search engines to crawl your page.  While this is true is not the only benefit to using CSS.

Fast download time - 

Because of organizational structure, and complex referencing system, users can access the data on your page at an accelerated rate.

More accessible - 

CSS is more friendly to hand held devices.  One third of the world owns a wireless device.

Print friendly - 

You can specify print instructions in the CSS, so when someone prints off the content on your web page it is laid out in a print user friendly form.

One of the things that I like most about CSS  is its level of specificity.  There are more options concerning space, function, and form.  

Organization is another huge benefit.  At least for me, I like to keep things as simple as possible.  When you code your site in straight html, you have a gigantic list of all kinds of commands weaving in and out of each other, its absolute chaos.

CSS allows you to keep everything separated, you can have a layout sheet concerning just the structure of the page, a style sheet regarding things like color and images, and then the separate xhtml sheet that just references everything.  So on the whole you are only observing one specific section of the code.  Instead of trying to view all the code simultaneously, it is sectioned out for you.  So writing and editing code is way easier.

Please give me some feedback, I know for some this is somewhat of a debate, I would love to hear your opinion regardless of what your views are.

thanks all