35 designers. 5 questions. 5 precise answers. Result: 175 professional suggestions, tips and ideas from some of the best web-developers all around the world. In March we’ve selected over 35 prominent designers and design companies, contacted them and asked to answer five design-related questions, sharing their knowledge and experience with fellows developers. Here on Smashing Magazine.

35 Designers: how did we find them?

How do you find the best designers worldwide? OK, a legitimate question. The fact is that we’ve tried so select the best ones, but we definitely have missed many creative, talented artists with solid portfolios, who are rather unknown in the community.

We didn’t choose by our intuition, we weren’t looking for any suggestions. Instead, we’ve spent few days analyzing Technorati rankings, Alexa rankings, link popularity, 9Rules directory, Design-Feed contributors and few more design-related web-sites. Besides, we’ve taken a close look at the professional experience of designers, their reputation in the design-community and the popularity of articles they’ve written in their weblogs.

We’ve browsed through numerous articles and hundreds of portfolios and in the end we’ve managed to select over 45 out of them. We’d like to thank all designers for participation and also thank to designers who had informed us in time whether they will be able to participate or not.

Five Questions

We’ve asked five questions. One single text line would have sufficed.

• 1 aspect of design you give the highest priority to.
• 1 most useful CSS-technique you use very often.
• 1 font you use in your projects very often.
• 1 design-related book you highly recommend to read.
• 1 design magazine you read on a daily/weekly basis (online or offline).

In the end we’ve received more answers than we expected. The results – over 80 CSS-based tips, design ideas, suggestions, fonts, design-related books and online-magazines – are listed below. It’s interesting to know, how designers work their magic. It’s interesting to know what you can actually learn from them.

1 aspect of design you give the highest priority to.

The initial part of the design process is probably the most creative and sophisticated part of web-development. First sketches, first layouts, first typography and color decisions – sometimes it appears that there are simply too many things to keep in mind – but also too many things left out by mistake in the final design. Yet there have to be the most important ones. Design aspects you, being a professional web-developer, give – or should give – the highest priority to; the ones that make or break a web-site.

You don’t learn them – you explore and grasp them. Depending on your personal style and your personal workflow, you determine the things you consider to be the most important in your designs – according to your professional experience, demanding clients, users’ behavior and constructive feedback. Communication is the key, but to find the right key is the task web-developers have to accomplish. In fact, every developer makes his/her own decision, setting the priorities of the things to be considered during the whole design process.

Yet it’s interesting to know, which aspects of design are given the highest priority by experienced and competent web-developers.

1.1 Communication

• Clear communication. [Cameron Adams, Australia]
• The ability for it to communicate. This is also what I admire the most in design. [Filipe Varela, Portugal]
• Design is all about finding the right solution to a particular problem (usually a communication problem when dealing with sites). That’s why I feel that the most important aspect would be understanding the user and centering everything around him/her. [Lucian Slatineanu, US/Romania]
• The initial stages of design: meeting the client to establish key audiences and aims; designing overall site labelling and architecture that meets the aims of these audiences; testing initial layouts to determine if they are successfully achieving the key aims. If these aspects have not been thought through carefully and tested then the overall site could fail – regardless of how elegant or engaging the design.
  [Russ Weakley, Australia]

1.2. Usability

• I think design usability has to be right up there. I like to think about how people will navigate the site even before starting any other design elements. By getting the navigation clear in my mind, the design begins to fall into place around it. [Andy Peatling, Canada]
• Usability. There’s a lot of room for creativity, but I want my web sites to be functional first and foremost. I’ll compromise graphic design for usability, but try not to compromise usability for graphic design. [Patrick Griffiths, UK]
• Usability, always! Everything we design should be easy to use. [Paul Boag, UK]
• I think that I apply the most emphasis on usability in my designs. As well as being aesthetically pleasing, a design should be a joy to use. It’s no good having the sexiest user interface in existence, if the user can’t figure out how to use it. It’s practically worthless. The true challenge of design, I feel, is making something look visually beautiful – but combining this with a lot of usability. Nobody says that something which is accessible can’t be aesthetically pleasing – in my mind, there are different levels of beauty, and to make a design work, utility has to be a major one of them. [Oliver Beattie, UK]
• Usability and functionality is always the first priority, but past that there are no boundaries. Thanks to css and javascript, you can make most anything happen on the web now. [Nick Francis, US]
• Usefulness. [Mike Davidson, USA]

1.3. Typography

• Designing on a grid. This makes things far more orderly visually, not to mention it allows the code to be more modular. Lately, I have had clients who are making the jump to layouts that are tailored to the 1024×768 pixel resolution. As such, I have found myself gravitating towards 960 pixels as the optimal width to work with. [Nathan Smith, US]
• Typographic Design. [Mark Boulton, UK]
• Symmetry and equal spacing. [Kyle Neath, US]
• Good typography. [Matthew Buchanan, New Zealand]
• Hierarchy! Too many designers ignore it in part or in full. [Cameron Moll, USA]