I would consider myself to be quite a creative person – coming from a very musical family, I’ve been surrounded by the arts my whole life – and I love the finished “product” of a good-looking website. But I also find that there is a sort of beauty to the code that lies behind it all.
I’m not just talking about the aesthetic beauty of a neatly coded page, but the beauty of the logic behind it all. I guess the musical comparison would be with a composer like J.S. Bach – you can simply sit back and enjoy listening to a work such as his Double Violin Concerto in D minor, but then you can also study the score closely and develop a greater appreciation of the truly flawless harmony and counterpoint that forms the backbone of such beautiful music.
One of the things I loved when I was first learning to design websites using HTML (or rather, XHTML 1.0 transitional with external CSS if you want to be pedantic about it!) was the very logical process of creating content in a very structured way using HTML mark-up. It’s such a commonsensical process; you start with your raw content, you categorise it by tagging it as header, footer, navigation, headings, paragraphs, quotes etc. and then add the artistic side of the design elements by attaching a style in CSS. This has always been a process I love going through – especially when starting out on a new web design project – but the thing I still think is marvellous is the logical beauty of keeping content and style separate, because if you want to go back to the drawing board you can just start work on a new style sheet and change the entire look of a webpage without having to touch the code of the page itself. How stupendous!
But the true logic to the art form of web design really comes into play when things don’t quite turn out as I expect when I preview a page. (Don’t get me wrong, it can be really frustrating when I’ve been working away in code view and I suddenly think to check how things are actually looking out there in the browser window, and upon seeing my page in the browser I think “Oh no! This isn’t how it’s supposed to look…”) All I need to do at that point is go into a detective-style mode and retrace the coded steps for the element of the page that isn’t displaying as I expected, and by doing that I can start to trace where the mistake comes from… and eventually I’ll reach the euphoric cartoon-style light-bulb-over-head moment and fix it! Ah, the logical beauty of web design…
