Critical Web Design

An innovative, learn-by-doing textbook that teaches how to design for the web while engaging a critical lens on the technoculture that sustains it.

Critical web design, like critical design, employs a social usefulness to challenge the ways technology enters our lives. It reclaims the mechanisms, tools, and practices used to produce coercive and commercial interfaces, harnessing the power of design and networked information to question preconceptions about the medium itself. This engaging, practical textbook explores how to design for the web while maintaining a critical understanding of the technoculture that sustains it. Motivated by new media art practices and speculative design, xtine burrough and Owen Mundy teach readers to conceptualize, design, and program responsive websites as both an applied and creative practice. Each chapter integrates coverage of the field’s historical and cultural concepts with hands-on, technical exercises. The result is a timely, innovative guide that makes professional front end development tools accessible to all.

• Learn-by-doing approach builds technical skills in interface design, usability/accessibility, and coding in HTML/CSS and Javascript
• Historical, political, and philosophical context relates the “why” argument for learning to code
• Case studies and interviews with artists and designers bring ideas to life
• Extensive supplemental resources include code, exercises, and video demonstrations

xtine burrough is a professor in the Bass School of Arts, Humanities, and Technology and the director of LabSynthE at the University of Texas, Dallas. She is the author of Foundations of Digital Art and Design and Net Works: Case Studies in Web Art and Design and a coeditor of Art as Social Practice: Technologies for Change.

Owen Mundy is Professor of the Practice in Film, Media, and Digital Studies at Davidson College and an artist, designer, and programmer whose work has been reviewed in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Time Magazine, NPR, and Wired Magazine.