What Medieval Philosophers can teach us about Web Design

By Joshua on December 06 2007

"Beauty is the splendor of truth."

This was a saying of the medieval scholastic philosophers. The basic idea is that Beauty (capital B) always has its source in Truth. They weren't stupid about the way that beauty and falsehood is often mixed on earth, but they thought that ultimately, if you trace it back far enough, the beauty is derived from truth.

What does this have to do with Web Design?

Even if you don't accept their claims, the inner connection between beauty and truth is at least a psychological reality. By and large, people tend to trust that which they find attractive.

Set someone down at a computer and show them two websites with identical content, but different designs. One of them is clean and well layed out, while the other looks crowded, illegible and has harsh color combinations. Now ask which of the two sites they found more trustworthy. Nine times out of ten, they'll go with the one that looks better. (And the tenth person may just have bad taste. ;-) )

Lesson: In order to appear credible, your website should be attractive to your audience.

Obviously, people have different tastes. But most of the time, members of your audience will have many things in common that can be drawn upon to create a design that is attractive to most of them.

This is one of the reasons why I recently updated the design of my site. Not everyone is a web geek. The previous design was catering more to my tastes than to the tastes of my audience.

Who is the design for?

This is a constant temptation, not just to web designers, but also to business owners. You always want to double-check yourself and ask, "Is this design for me or for my audience?"