A dao of web design turns 10

• In: Blog
• By:John
• April 8, 2010

A decade ago, I wrote an arti­cle “A Dao of Web Design” that the then youngish A List Apart pub­lished appar­ently exactly 10 years ago today.

At the time, I prac­ticed a lot of Tai Chi (which is closely asso­ci­ated with the phi­los­o­phy of Daoism) (sadly, I do so much less now), and the Tao Te Ching was very influ­en­tial on my think­ing (it still is, though per­haps less directly), and the cen­tral con­cept of the Tao Te Ching, that the way of the uni­verse is fluid and adapt­able, not fixed and rigid occurred to me as a per­fect phi­los­o­phy of design­ing for the web.

At the time, the com­mon com­plaint about the web as a medium is that design­ers had less con­trol over their design than with many other media (screen sizes and color depths var­ied, users could change the size of the win­dow, or text, all impact­ing a lov­ingly crafted design). To me, this loss of con­trol (and con­se­quent gain of con­trol by the user) seemed a fea­ture, not a bug, of the medium.

Much has changed in that decade, in the world, in my life, and on the web. But I feel the under­ly­ing idea still holds up very well.

I’ve long since meant to revisit the arti­cle, and per­haps will get the chance one day, but for now, it will need to stand on its own two feet a lit­tle longer.

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