Colophon is a word not often heard outside of conversations between typography nerds. But it’s a word worth adding to the web nerd’s vocabulary.

A colophon is a brief description on the inside cover of a book that credits the designer, typographer and printer for their work and identifies the typefaces, papers and printing and binding methods used in the book’s creation. Colophons have been popular since the renaissance and remain common in printed material (most notably in design books, which feature comprehensive colophons, some of them ludicrously detailed).

Website and blog colophons, where they actually exist, are rarely more than a copyright notice and a handful of icons that link to html and css validators at the bottom of each page. Rather than clutter a site with icons that for most users have no meaning, a dedicated colophon page could:

• credit designers, coders, hosts and other contributors (with contact details and links to their websites)
• demonstrate the site’s accessibility and compliance with web standards.
• demonstrate the site’s accessibility and compliance with web standards.
• Give further information regarding copyright and attribution (it may be the case that copyright details are required on all pages, but attribution for icons, photography or other intellectual property may appear on the colophon page).

If colophons were to become standardised features of websites, the design and web communities could more easily share their knowledge, and admirers could more easily contact the designers and coders who produce them.

Examples of Colophons:

• Wittenburg University Library’s colophon
  
• 1976design’s colophon
• Vinny Carpenter’s colophon
• Anti-Pixel’s colophon

No related posts.

It was interesting to see usability professionals excited about what designers have been doing for a long time. Though the division between doing user experience or usability and design doesn’t exist too much at Digital Eskimo anyway (perhaps when it is differentiated, it’s specifically based on methodology).

There weren’t any big surprises in the talk (which is a relief really since my background is in design and we are a design company), and it was reassuring to see how much of what is considered the ‘design thinking’ approach (new, inspirational, nimble, exciting, participatory, innovative and strategic) we already do at DE.

It does trigger me to comment on something that has been in the back of my mind recently though – that for usability professionals, HCI peoples and interaction designers, their/our/my history has come from the computer, from computing technology. Where as design more generally has never been constrained to this. Design has been coming to computing rather than the other way around.

Lots of the more recently introduced “design thinking” and “designerly approaches” to HCI (which are indeed exciting but not new to designers of course), are becoming popular due to HCI/UPA peoples being “released from the desktop” as computing becomes ubiquitous, mobile, pervasive, and everyday. Whereas designers have always been in the everyday. Our products have always lived in the world (although, that doesn’t directly translate to design practice always being human-centred in the way that we mean that in HCI).

I’m not sure how significant this is if all, but I think it is a pretty interesting aspect of the HCI/Design convergence thing that is happening.

Related posts:

1. Design won’t save the world, Design Thinking will

• Zeldman: E-mail is not a platform for design
• Campaign Monitor: Zeldman says ‘HTML mail still sucks’
• Zeldman: Eight points for better e-mail relationships

Definitely worth a read if you’re putting out HTML emails – great tips and advice.

(As an aside – this exchange also points out the power of corporate blogging, but that’s not the primary point…)

Related posts:

1. HTML Emails and Send Studio
2. Email standards project