Servage Magazine

In sense of a language, the word “Design” has broad spectrum of meanings, but for we web designers, have some limited scopes to feel it. If you are at planning and prototyping stages of development, simple boxes and lines will make a great design for you and your clients.

Once you jump in to the graphics designing software, aesthetics of design part would become visible and color, shapes, typography, etc. visual elements will begin to make some sense for you and your clients. As soon as your programmer is giving final touch to your website or web application and your QA team is giving green signals to upload it on the live server from development server, its functionality will matter more than others will.

In short, a web designing team has to please three types of audiences at a time with their web designing. The first one is the team of other web designer in the community, the second is their client who are spending money, and final one is their user group who are really using the website.

Pleasing Designer Community by Design

No doubt, this one is ideal audience if we want to have real and constructive feedback for our web designing career or profession. They will check your code at HTML, CSS, and other scripting perspectives. They will gauge the real beauty of your graphics, layout designing, texture, colors, and typography used in your web design. Therefore, their approval matters more than a mere certificate and has potential to bring lots of B2B business for you. In short, aesthetics of web design make sense for top-level of designers.

Pleasing Clients by Design

This act done by majority of web designing community, as their clients are ultimate payers for their work. Therefore, smart web designers always write wise words of wisdom that they are designing for their clients, not for their satisfactions or pride. Our clients always have marketing perspectives. They think of their targeted audiences, their culture, their likeness and dis-likeness. They know the psychologies of their audiences so they put practical expectations in front of their web designers and do bargaining according to their budgets.

In short, if you please your ultimate payers, your clients, you are liable to get lots of B2C and some B2B business in multiple niches. No doubt, some clients seek aesthetics, but not at first place. They are marketers and think of their brands. They wish to highlight it and engage their audiences with it.

Pleasing Target Audience by Design

They are the real users of your web design and ultimate targets of both designers and clients depicted above. Therefore, each stakeholder of website and its designing process wishes to please this group of people anyhow. In some instances, predicting the target audience and their acceptability for our design is easy, but in most of the cases, tough to impossible. Therefore, designers and clients both are doing die-hard efforts to know them thoroughly before and during as well as after the website designing and development process.

This category of people wants to have really functional or working designs of your website or web application. Their ultimate target is to solve their problems so they wish to have quick and perfect solutions from your design, just before judging its aesthetics or marketing purposes. They have diverse choices such as many want to have extremely beautiful design (just like designers wish) whereas many think of the messages deliver by your design putting beauty of your design (just like clients think), and there are many who wish to have all sorts of perfection in content, graphics design, typography, colors, performance, accessibility, etc.

Therefore, pleasing them is hard and even harder for designers/developers with least efforts and time.

Conclusively, I would like to say that we web designing community have to focus on aesthetics, marketing, and functional aspects of our web designs in a balanced manner.
References & More Reading
What Design Really Means
The Difference Between Good Design and Great Design