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I oversee Web development for a living and graphic design is always where the discussion starts when management wants to improve a site. That does not mean that graphic design is the actual problem with the Web site though. I earn my money by asking questions and leading a discussion that gets to the heart of the real problems.

Graphic design is a wash on the information layout of the site. It is important for making your site look professional and easy on the eyes. But it cannot fix any underlying problems with how the site is organized or the information laid out on a page. Have a good discussion/think about what your company does and wants to accomplish with the site, then take a look and see whether the page layout, navigation, etc emphasize the right things. It's amazing how often people want to change the colors and add more pictures, then it turns out that the one thing they want their site to do isn't prominent in the nav or is barely keyworded (a ton of site traffic comes from search engines these days).

Have a look at this:

http://www.jjg.net/elements/pdf/elements.pdf

Note that graphic design is the top and final step--the polish. If you've built a crappy car (analogy), then no amount of polish is going to make it work. If you're interested in site design, I highly recommend the book by the same name:

http://www.jjg.net/elements/

I oversee Web development for a living and graphic design is always where the discussion starts when management wants to improve a site. That does not mean that graphic design is the actual problem with the Web site though. I earn my money by asking questions and leading a discussion that gets to the heart of the real problems.

Graphic design is a wash on the information layout of the site. It is important for making your site look professional and easy on the eyes. But it cannot fix any underlying problems with how the site is organized or the information laid out on a page. Have a good discussion/think about what your company does and wants to accomplish with the site, then take a look and see whether the page layout, navigation, etc emphasize the right things. It's amazing how often people want to change the colors and add more pictures, then it turns out that the one thing they want their site to do isn't prominent in the nav or is barely keyworded (a ton of site traffic comes from search engines these days).

Have a look at this:

http://www.jjg.net/elements/pdf/elements.pdf

Note that graphic design is the top and final step--the polish. If you've built a crappy car (analogy), then no amount of polish is going to make it work. If you're interested in site design, I highly recommend the book by the same name:

http://www.jjg.net/elements/

Sorry, but flowcharting isn't used in interaction design. Part of this is because so little of user interaction is garden-pathed anymore (at least the stuff done properly) that traditional flowcharting isn't appropriate. I refer you to Garrett IA, which is much more appropriate.

Of course this could be for historical purposes, but is that still done in schools? Some bad habits die hard, I guess, but I thought that flowcharting was dropped when Dijkstra declared "goto" harmful. Flowcharting has given way to pseudocode and for some UML (not that it shouldn't go the way of flowcharting, but every tool has its purpose). It's a very dangerous way of looking at coding, as it discourages abstraction, assumes a global data space (when scoping is essential to modern programming), and allows for arbitrary jumps from point to point (i.e. goto). Of course this could be all part of the lesson, but in case it isn't, I just want this student to know that there is so much more to visual software design. Of course, UML is popular these days, and for user interaction, there's the Visual Interaction Vocabulary by Jesse James Garrett. There are lessons to be learned from Flowcharting, but mostly about what to avoid.

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