Effective design principles for web designers: Proximity

By Ryan Boudreaux

Takeaway: Ryan Boudreaux finishes his series on the four basic design principles. Here, he reviews proximity and how it can be used to better please the eye.

This is the final segment in our four-part series on effective web design principles, concluding with the topic of proximity. The previous topics and segments in the effective web design principles series covered Contrast, Repetition, and Alignment. Guiding the user through your website with proper flow, effective use of white space, positioning similar content closer together, and providing clear structure are all facets of the proximity design standard.

Proximity, prox-im-ity, [prok-sim-i-tee] noun, nearness in space or time, order, occurrence, or relation, closeness in a series, vicinity, order.

Spacing and relationships

Proximity for web design purposes means that similar or related elements should be grouped together, while those that are unrelated or dissimilar should be separated. The physical relationships and spaces between web design elements create a level of emphasis, and include other factors such as isolation, similarity, eye movement and direction, continuance, andpersistence of vision.

As elements overlap or touch, the top layer typically gets the primary attention. Did you notice the "Proximity" piece of the puzzle above? Did your eye gravitate to the purple puzzle piece first, and then move up and to the left to scan the remaining pieces? However the overlapping object suddenly becomes overshadowed if the other objects close by are in stark contrast; as objects become closer together the contrasting elements will stand out. Striking a balance between closeness and contrast, and even manipulating the two principles can achieve varied results. Take a look at Figure B below and see where your eye gravitates. Did you first notice the "Repetition" puzzle piece?

Every object or element has a gravitational pole in relation to the other objects that are nearer to its center, and the closer an object is to another also affects its weight. Just as a planet's gravity affects its moon orbit, the positions of elements to each other on a web page can change the weight given to it and other elements on the page.

White space

An additional proximity factor is the effective use of white space on the web page, spacing elements utilizing effective margins, gutters between columns, and padding creates a balance between the content and the space between elements. In general, too much white space and the web page looks irregular and void of content, with no direction. Of course, if your web design requires a level of artistic license to accentuate open space with an undeniable void of content for dramatic effect, then go for it.

Proximity and typography

Above, I talked about the negative effects of too much white space, but too little white space can make the web page appear cluttered and cramped. As a rule of thumb, a balanced white space is generally more attractive and pleasing to the eye. Below are two examples which demonstrate both ends of the white space gamut. Figure C, for example, is too much white space, and Figure Dhas too little.

Figure C

Figure D

An intuitive flow of content reveals a balance of white space and the typographic elements that comprise the textual content. Take the first example of the IT Course List shown below in Figure E, and try to step through the list of courses available.

Figure E

Now, take a look at the same list below, which now has each logical grouping defined with appropriate white space, appropriate headings, and unordered lists as displayed in Figure Fbelow.

Figure F

The second list is easily delivered and provides the reader various sections and sub-sections of the course list; each of the courses is in close proximity to the associated and related sub-section header.

Employing the proximity principle of effective web design helps to organize content elements on the web page utilizing space, order, size, relationships, color, and effective use of white space and sectioning throughout typographic elements.

The future of IT will be reduced to three kinds of jobs

By Jason Hiner

Takeaway: The IT profession and the IT job market are in the midst of seismic changes that are going to shift the focus to three types of jobs.

There's a general anxiety that has settled over much of the IT profession in recent years. It's a stark contrast to the situation just over a decade ago. At the end of the 1990s, IT pros were the belles of the ball. The IT labor shortage regularly made headlines and IT pros were able to command excellent salaries by getting training and certification, job hopping, and, in many cases, being the only qualified candidate for a key position in a thinly-stretched job market. At the time, IT was held up as one of the professions of the future, where more and more of the best jobs would be migrating as computer-automated processes replaced manual ones.

Unfortunately, that idea of the future has disappeared, or at least morphed into something much different.

The glory days when IT pros could name their ticket evaporated when the Y2K crisis passed and then the dot com implosion happened. Suddenly, companies didn't need as many coders on staff. Suddenly, there were a lot fewer startups buying servers and hiring sysadmins to run them.

Around the same time, there was also a general backlash against IT in corporate America. Many companies had been throwing nearly-endless amounts of money at IT projects in the belief that tech was the answer to all problems. Because IT had driven major productivity improvements during the 1990s, a lot of companies over-invested in IT and tried to take it too far too fast. As a result, there were a lot of very large, very expensive IT projects that crashed and burned.

When the recession of 2001 hit, these massively overbuilt IT departments were huge targets for budget cuts and many of them got hit hard. As the recession dragged out in 2002 and 2003, IT pros mostly told each other that they needed to ride out the storm and that things would bounce back. But, a strange thing happened. IT budgets remained flat year after year. The rebound never happened.

Fast forward to 2011. Most IT departments are a shadow of their former selves. They've drastically reduced the number of tech support professionals, or outsourced the help desk entirely. They have a lot fewer administrators running around to manage the network and the servers, or they've outsourced much of the data center altogether. These were the jobs that were at the center of the IT pro boom in 1999. Today, they haven't totally disappeared, but there certainly isn't a shortage of available workers or a high demand for those skill sets.

That's because the IT environment has changed dramatically. More and more of traditional software has moved to the web, or at least to internal servers and served through a web browser. Many technophobic Baby Boomers have left the workforce and been replaced by Millennials who not only don't need as much tech support, but often want to choose their own equipment and view the IT department as an obstacle to productivity. In other words, today's users don't need as much help as they used to. Cynical IT pros will argue this until they are blue in the face, but it's true. Most workers have now been using technology for a decade or more and have become more proficient than they were a decade ago. Plus, the software itself has gotten better. It's still horribly imperfect, but it's better.

So where does that leave today's IT professionals? Where will the IT jobs of the future be?

1. Consultants

Let's face it, all but the largest enterprises would prefer to not to have any IT professionals on staff, or at least as few as possible. It's nothing personal against geeks, it's just that IT pros are expensive and when IT departments get too big and centralized they tend to become experts at saying, "No." They block more progress than they enable. As a result, we're going to see most of traditional IT administration and support functions outsourced to third-party consultants. This includes a wide range from huge multi-national consultancies to the one person consultancy who serves as the rented IT department for local SMBs. I'm also lumping in companies like IBM, HP, Amazon AWS, and Rackspace, who will rent out both data center capacity and IT professionals to help deploy, manage, and troubleshoot solutions. Many of the IT administrators and support professionals who currently work directly for corporations will transition to working for big vendors or consultancies in the future as companies switch to purchasing IT services on an as-needed basis in order to lower costs, get a higher level of expertise, and get 24/7/365 coverage.

2. Project managers

Most of the IT workers that survive and remain as employees in traditional companies will be project managers. They will not be part of a centralized IT department, but will be spread out in the various business units and departments. They will be business analysts who will help the company leaders and managers make good technology decisions. They will gather business requirements and communicate with stakeholders about the technology solutions they need, and will also be proactive in looking for new technologies that can transform the business. These project managers will also serve as the company's point of contact with technology vendors and consultants. If you look closely, you can already see a lot of current IT managers morphing in this direction.

3. Developers

By far, the area where the largest number of IT jobs is going to move is into developer, programmer, and coder jobs. While IT used to be about managing and deploying hardware and software, it's going to increasingly be about web-based applications that will be expected to work smoothly, be self-evident, and require very little training or intervention from tech support. The other piece of the pie will be mobile applications — both native apps and mobile web apps. As I wrote in my article, We're entering the decade of the developer, the current changes in IT are "shifting more of the power in the tech industry away from those who deploy and support apps to those who build them." This trend is already underway and it's only going to accelerate over the next decade.