LEGO For Web Designers
As I laid on the brown shag rug of my living room, I struggled to figure out how to complete the model of the space shuttle before me assembled using my meagre supply of LEGO bricks. I didn’t have a great deal of LEGO, but I sure had big plans for this model. My ambitions with LEGO building, coupled with my relatively short supply of bricks often lead to (what I thought) were some very innovative and creative results.
Twenty years later, I now find myself at the kitchen table helping my three year old assemble his first LEGO model of a fire station. Incredibly, the basic premise of the LEGO building system has not changed a bit since the seventies. This is often the sign of a very well thought-out piece of technology. LEGO has been one of the most successful toys ever created, with fans of all ages worldwide building just about anything they can dream up.
As a web designer and developer, I am realizing how remarkably similar the creative processes of LEGO building and web design really are. The current XHTML (eXtensible Hypertext Markup Language) standard includes a very simple set of tags that are used to arrange information on a web page in a meaningful way, leaving the designer to work with a combination of Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) rules that define how the structured page is to look. These tags or elements are not at all unlike bricks of LEGO.