The World of Web Design

Not to be overly dramatic, but the World Wide Web is one of modern society’s sterling achievements.
It’s everywhere — from the home to the classroom. We use it to communicate at work or to waste some hours playing at night. The World Wide Web’s something that’s always there — accessible 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. The World Wide Web never sleeps.
The beginnings of this technological marvel are humbling. A group of bookish and serious engineers, wishing to exchange information more effectively, designed the World Wide Web in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
The concerns of these early engineers were about function — not necessarily form. On occasion, one of them might add a horizontal bar to separate sections of a document. However, these engineers mostly stuck with simple white or gray web pages that used black text.
Want an idea of how far we’ve come? Check out an early HTML document from The Simple Times newsletter, pictured in figure below. It dates from 1992.

Eventually, more and more users came to use the World Wide Web. Creative types and designers wanted more control over the format of web pages. In a response to these demands, the web transformed from a stale message board to a flowering communication entity unimagined by those first architects.

To design for the web effectively, you must bring to the table both creative flair and technical savvy. You must know how to make a page appealing without distracting from its message. You must know how to provide images that are interesting, and yet won’t take minutes to view.

Take a look at figure below to see how far we’ve come in the past decade.

In this tutorial:

1. The World of Web Design
2. Information Every Web Designer Should Know 
3. Exploring Digital Images
4. Types of 2D Graphics