Design Festival: Over-Designing the Web

When the national library of France was built, it was an impressive feat of engineering and architecture. Like many buildings of the late 20th century, it used quite a bit of glass. In fact, as you can see, the majority of the facade is glass. Unfortunately, that made it into a huge hot greenhouse that started to damage the books. The thousands of giant wooden shutters that were put in to deflect the sunlight are a clumsy solution to a problem that could have been prevented.

It can be very tempting to make a web project look impressive to passersby without giving due consideration to how people will be using it in their daily lives. Read the rest of this article on Design Festival!