This article provides an excellent summary of how the web design process should run (and rounds off a superb 24 Ways series).
I agree with it 100% (after all, why work backwards or waste time showing clients what are essentially photographs of real web pages?)
Red rum = murder backwards. Geddit? (From gonemovies.com)
My only issue with the article is that it argues that CSS3 acts as a sort of replacement for all those fancy photoshop effects (rounded corners, shadows, transparency etc.). It does, but it was quite possible to design web pages without Photoshop before CSS3.
Web design is over populated by graphic designers. But web pages are not posters. They are (and always will be) documents.
So it doesn’t matter if CSS doesn’t have a ragged–edge property. Web pages shouldn’t be taking their design cues from graphic design, they should be influenced by document styling. To be plain: typography. As it’s found in books and magazines.
White space, grids, leading, measure, emphasis et al make documents attractive and easy to read. They’ve been around since font-size, float, margin and padding. Good designers can make web pages attractive in IE6 without CSS3 and a million image hacks.
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