Designing for the web today requires leveraging sound and well-tested information-design principles while increasing the amount of interaction and "social" components offered to your readers.
The Web wave 2.0 has seemingly brought significant design innovation in the form of rounded corners, pastel colors, 3D embossed shiny buttons, floor reflections and large text captions and many a designer have rapidly adopted and made theirs this new simpler, more visually impactful and highly legible 2.0 style.
But what separates cute 2.0 cosmetics from true design innovation, is the ability of information architects and web designers to skillfully orchestrate the multiple forms of interaction and engagement that Web 2.0 services and technologies have come to offer: Multi-dimensional navigation, social bookmarking, community search, readers recommendations and comments, user generated content and contributions, video and chat components, grassroots news... you name it. It is in this direction that information designers could look next: moving beyond the basic visual organization of content elements and into the realm of social simplicity where the elements information reading, contributing and exchanging are coreographed in ways to make them mutually supprtive and synergistic.
Simple & Social - This is... Twitter.
By Robin Good on http://www.masternewmedia.org