Teaching Simple Design

I keep meaning to link to blog.IT, a great instructional technology journal by a woman named Evan. Today she's talking about cool vs. constraints in design using excellent examples from her student interns.

"They learned how to create tables, links, and style sheets. In my mind, that's all you need to know to create a decent site. That is the foundation. But every quarter the skilled students complain that they aren't getting to do enough 'cool' stuff, not realizing that sometimes a more simplistic design can be 'cooler'."

I think she's on the right track. Designers, especially new designers, often get so caught up in the possibilites of the technology that they lose sight of the purpose of the design. And people can always learn programming languages and fancier stuff on their own -- it's actually easier to learn those things later when you have a contextual problem you're trying to solve. I'd way rather have students learning to create usable sites with good organization and elegant design.