Math in Web Design

[Htom Sirveaux]

What sort of mathematics do you need to have a good handle on in web design? It sounds like an interesting field, but back in highschool, math was never my strong suit (never got further than algebra 1), and by now I'm sure I don't remember jack.

It also looks like a lot of logic and (in a sense) linguistics. Those are fine, I'm good with that stuff. It's the math that has me wary.

Advice?

[Kaligraphic]

Most of the math that I use in designing web sites is pretty basic. Addition, subtraction, multiplication, division - basic arithmetic. What does help is the ability to hold the results of one operation in your head while you move on to another, related element.

I would say that you should invest some time into learning to interpret hexadecimal, but that's not particularly difficult. If you can recognize common numbers up to 255 in hexadecimal (FF), you should be fine.

Basically, if you can balance your checkbook, you've got the basic math skill required for web design. Frankly, the big area where people tend to fall down is layout, and the psychology of positioning, rather than the mechanics of how many pixels should be between one element and another. The next most important skill in web design is the ability to see connections within your content, and to understand how people will try to find what you're offering.

Admittedly, I come from a technical background, but I've actually found Photoshop to be the most difficult aspect to master.

[Mithrandir]

Do you actually just mean design, or do you mean coding as well? Design is very basic, as has already been mentioned. When you're dealing with coding - especially when you are talking about interactive or social stuff - you can really find yourself needing some hard-core math. If you want to have your users be able to see a curved graph of stuff, then figuring out how to plot might can be troublesome - unless you can jog your memory. Or if you need to do any kind of statistical calculations or whatever, you'll at least need to be able to read the wikipedia articles and figure it out from there.

On the other side of the coin, there are probably places on the Internet with free snippets of code that already "do that math stuff" for you, so you just steal them and plug them into your code. Of course, not being able to audit said code is a major security issue - but it's at least worth knowing.

HIH

[Dante]

I think there is probably a good deal of space in web design for someone who doesn't have a great handle on math. Now, I really like math - but I'll be honest. In programming html and css webpages, between the em, %, px, margin, left, right, top, bottom, relative, absolute, float, z-index ect. ect., a person with a lot of persistence and learned skill could probably beat someone with a bucket-loads worth of math. Persistence in debugging and searching the internet for similar problems that you can apply to your solution is half the battle here.

Programming across web browsers and screen resolutions is a skill and while math certainly can help a great deal, I imagine you could get a fair distance by just getting a feel for the what things do over time. Do grab division, multiplication, subtraction and addition and understand a few uses for them. For instance, understand how to add position vectors from the upper right hand corner. If I have an object at [4px,10px] and I want to place another object relative to that at [20px,30px], what vector would I add to the first one to get the object to the second location? The other aspect is unit conversion - say I built the website above in pixels and need to convert the units over so that my page is more fluid on other screen resolutions... then I need to convert the whole silly thing over to ems. After finagling one element around in ems until it was exactly the same as another one in pixels, I found that at my resolution I had 16 pixels per em. If I had a banner that was 140px in height, what would I need to switch it over to in ems to make it cross screen resolution compatible.

The good news is that word problems like these will start to feel familiar over time. Over time though, if you're going to move up in programming, I'd work on getting a solid logic and creative skill-set and mathematics is the traditional road for getting this. Best thing to do is find a math teacher at a local community college that is known to be really enjoyable to take - you want to learn to 'enjoy' math. Then taking more math won't be nearly as big of an issue.

Yes - math can be enjoyable, you've just been deprived of the opportunity to experience it for it's more 'fun' side.