Sometimes designers get carried away by their own 'cleverness'. And, without realising it, their 'brilliant, innovative' design results in confusion. Clearly, these are bad designers, because design that works against good functionality and is user-unfriendly is poor design. Now try and imagine this kind of layout on a web page - a three-column format, in which the text runs to the bottom of one column and then resumes its thread at the top of the second column, then goes right down and continues at the top of the third column. Ridiculous?

While redesigning the website of a company in early 2001 we actually encountered a design done by a British design agency, in which the company's web pages had been laid out in three-column formats!
Trying to be different? We don't know, but the result was extremely poor readability.

One of the first things we did was throw out the three-column format. On a web page, text must begin at the top in one column and end at the bottom of the column. If you have to continue it, you must do so on another page.

By arrangement with www.prdomain.com

Back to Know-how index