What web designers can learn from artists - from Van Gogh to Lloyd Wright

Art in it's classic form, like painting and sculpting, is not that different to the creations of web and UI designers. Even though their purpose is different - as the goal of great web design is to enhance user experiences - there's still a lot to learn from the former.

By now you may have been intruiged to read this article, but I'm sorry to inform you that this is not some 'Medium-like-inspirational-design-take-kind-of-story'. This is just an article full of gibberish, written in a way that makes it look like a real article, but it's not. It's sole purpose is to look good in this CodePen demo, this CMS design concept. The image has also nothing to do with the accompanied text, it's just a filler like everything else. You see, I feel it's sometimes better to use 'real' text rather than 'Lorem Ipsum'. However, this text is not real. Well, of course it's real, since someone has written it (me), but it's not a real blog post.

For designers it's important, or even necessary to, use real data instead of 'Lorem ipsum'. Sure, the latin excerpt is popular, but the problem is that you don't understand what it says there. This is not just a problem for articles, but for UI in general. How do you think the site structure on the left would look like if I replaced 'Product' and 'Pricing' with 'Lorem Ipsum' and 'Dolor Sit'? Doesn't give you the right impression, does it? And I know what you're thinking: 'Product' and 'Pricing' isn't real data either, it's just made up names of pages. That's true - but it's still better than the alternative. Also, after all, this is just a pen, and this design is just a concept. But it looks legit, right?

Why 'Form Follows Function' is a valid rule to live by in web design

Use text that your client provides. Give your UI good labels, labels that are actually going to be used in production. There's several reasons as to why it's better to use real data instead of 'Lorem Ipsum':

• It's more readable (obviously)
• You stress test your designs, meaning that you'll become more aware of errors caused by line-breaks and text overflow.
• It's more fun and rewarding, since you've designed something that looks real

Don't read to much into this, though. This article was never meant to convince you to stop using 'Lorem Ipsum', this is in fact just an article full of gibberish.

More filler content

I could've easily written about how you make potato salad without potatoes, or written a fairytale about potato salad princes and potato salad princesses, instead.

I did not. At least I saved the potato salad part of this article to a section further down, so far down that you'll perhaps have to scroll to read it (depending on your screen size), hopefully saving you from thinking "Why does he mention potato salad in an article about web design?" before you've taken a look at the CMS design concept. Which again is the whole purpose of this pen.

If you liked this pen I suggest you should check out some of my other pens.