/Interview/ Thomas Silkjær
04/09/2006 | Filed under Design > Interview
Thomas Silkjær is a designer at 2Krogh, a small Danish agency focused on designing books. He loves combining typographic rules with new media and is currently working on an ambitious project to publish a book containing 150 of the best web designs
.net: Can you tell us what the web design reference book project is all about?
TS: The idea is to publish a book with 150 of the internet’s greatest web designs. They’ll be categorised by style and colour, and there will be a designer index. It will be a handy tool for anyone who wants inspiration for their own designs. I hope that it will become a tool for companies who want to find designers as well.
The book will also contain some articles and interviews with and about specially selected designers. We want the best people to share their best tips with web standards in mind. This is the first year the project has run. It launched on 23 January and the goal is to make it an annual event. We want people in the business to know the name for what it is: a great source of inspiration that’s published every year.
.net: What kinds of sites are eligible for your project?
TS: Anything designed to comply with W3C valid designs. There are many reasons for this but it’s mainly because only 20 per cent of my site’s visitors use Internet Explorer, compared to the 60 per cent that use Firefox and the 20 per cent on Safari, which seems pretty natural considering that most of them are web designers and developers. Most of these people hate IE because it doesn’t comply with web standards, which is ironic, though, as most of them don’t use web standards when they’re coding! If you want to make the net a better place, always keep standards in mind. Over 50 per cent of the best looking designs submitted for this project are rejected because of lazy coding. The other two criteria for submitting sites are tableless design and a decent look.
.net: How did you come up with the idea?
TS: I’ve been following many website galleries on the net for years, but one thing I’ve noticed is that the books are always judged by their cover. Since semantic markup broke, through, online galleries have followed the ‘frame vs no frames’ and ‘tables vs divs’ debates closely. Most galleries today won’t approve designs made with tables – but I wanted to take it one step further and consider only W3C valid sites. I also thought a lot about how to present my gallery: everyone who knows a little PHP and HTML can make a gallery, so I wanted to make a book.
.net: What makes a good web site?
TS: I’d say it depends on the content and the people you want to reach as well as on the site’s purpose. Overall I think fewer images, better use of CSS, crossbrowser functionality and accessibility are important. It’s very important for a popular site to not use a lot of bandwidth for transferring unnecessary image elements from the design. On the internet you see a lot of images used for something that could easily be achieved with pure CSS.
.net: Whose work do you admire on the web?
TS: My brother and I have always been really competitive. We’re over it now, though, and I really like a lot of his stuff at silkjær.dk. I like to follow what John Oxton writes at joshuaink.com and johnoxton. co.uk, and I also check hicksdesign.co.uk once in a while as well.
.net: What are your favourite sites?
TS: I check quite a few websites daily. They’re mostly Danish newspapers, but I also visit alistapart.com, stylegala.com, 456bereastreet.com and digg.com regularly.
.net: What annoys you about the web?
TS: Besides spam, porn and software piracy what annoys me most is theft. People don’t think twice before they rip a design off or use graphical elements from other sites. They remove copyright notices from the source code of free JavaScript snippets, website templates and themes. It’s impossible to do anything about it because when you do a piece of work and lay it out for everyone to see, it’s quickly propagated all over the internet.
.net: What do you think about the forthcoming XHTML 2.0 specification?
TS: I like it. I love following the move from HTML to XML and this is a great step. I’m just hoping that the move will, in the end, make it easier to design for all browsers. It also looks to me like XHTML 2.0 is much easier to learn that HTML ever was. It’s way more semantic and less confusing.
.net: What’s your biggest dream?
TS: Probably to start my own business focusing on book design and web design. Book design is a great passion of mine, probably the result of working at 2Krogh. It’s a small design agency in Denmark, where one of our main strengths is book design, especially bibles and hymn books.
