What is web design

What Is Web Design: An Introduction to the Basics

A variety of skills are needed to create a great website

Jennifer Kyrnin is a professional web developer who assists others in learning web design, HTML, CSS, and XML.

Web design is the planning and creation of websites. This includes a number of separate skills that all fall under the umbrella of web design.

Some examples of these skills are information architecture, user interface, site structure, navigation, layout, colors, fonts, and overall imagery. All of these skills are combined with the principles of design to create a website that meets the goals of the company or individual from whom that site is being created.

This article will take a look at the basics of website design and the various disciplines or skills that are a part of this industry.

Design Is Key Part of Web Design

Design, obviously, is a key part of «web design.» What does this mean exactly? Design includes both the principles of design — balance, contrast, emphasis, rhythm, and unity — and the design elements — lines, shapes, texture, color, and direction.

By putting these things together, a web designer creates websites, but a good web designer understands not only the principles of design but also the constraints of the Web. For example, a successful web designer will be skilled in typographic design principles, while also understanding the challenges of web type design and specifically how it differs from other kinds of type design.

In addition to understanding the limitations of the Web, a successful web professional also has a firm grasp of the strengths of digital communication.

Web Design Has Many Different Roles

When you work as a web designer, you may be tasked with creating (or working on) entire sites or just individual pages and there is a lot to learn to be a well-rounded designer, including the following:

There’s also so much more areas and skills that cross into the field of web design, but most designers don’t try to cover all of them. Instead, a web designer will generally focus on one or two areas where they can excel. The other items in web design that are needed are ones that they can partner with others one as part of a larger web design team.

Web Design

What is web design? Web design is the process of conceptualizing, planning, and building websites and web apps. Web design encompasses many different skills and disciplines in the world of design, development, and website maintenance such as front-end design and development, graphic design, usability, and performance optimization. All disciplines work together to achieve the common goal of creating a user-friendly web experience that allows users of diverse abilities to navigate, understand, and use a website to achieve their goals. Continue reading for additional insights, best practices, and web design tools for effective UX design.

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Explore the concept of affordances and why they are so important in UX design.

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Proximity in Design

The design principle of proximity suggests that objects close together will be perceived as a unit.

What Are the Main Components of Web Design?

Every designer will approach building a website differently, but these are the main components of web design:В

What Makes a Good Web Design?

Good web design has visual weight, is optimized for various devices, and has content that is prioritized for the medium. Web pages are scanned, not read, so the most important elements of a web page should have more visual weight to naturally attract a visitor’s attention. Eye-tracking technologies –heatmaps, focus maps, and gaze point plots–can help designers identify the areas of a site that capture the most attention.

Optimization for various types of devices and resolutions plays a fundamental role in modern website design. Web page layouts should be genuinely responsive and not rely on any fixed-size elements. Web designers using fluid grids and flexible images will guarantee that a web page will render well on a variety of devices, windows, and screen sizes. All pages should be optimized for fast loading, and mobile users shouldn’t face slow loading times caused by non-optimized web assets.

Last but not least, the content layout should be optimized for each type of device (e.g., users on mobile devices should be able to clearly see the most important content right after a page loads).В

What Is Web Design vs. Web Development?

Web design refers to the visual elements and usability of a website while web development refers to the functionality of a website.

Typically, a web designer focuses on the look and feel of things, using tools like Photoshop, Illustrator, and XD to create and customize a website’s visual elements. Since usability is an important factor in web design, both UI and UX principles are used to help meet users’ needs and to solve problems. A web developer’s role is to make the web designer’s concept come to life using software like JQuery or Javascript.

Read on for more insights and web design best practices and stay up-to-date on the latest developments in UX design knowledge.

What is web design?

Web design has become a form of digital creativity, wiping away all the boundaries of art and commerce.

Basics and beginnings of web design

Web design is one of the essentials of web development, web designers part of the work is to imagine and create/design a web page using images, formatting HTML, standardization and usability of the web page.

Web designing requires a lot of different skills, standards and disciplines which are used in making and maintaining a website. Under term web design we think of web and graphic design, interface design, authoring, standardized coding, user environment and search engine optimization.

While some people cover all of these skills by themselves, most of people usually work in teams for faster production and a more professional approach. To be more precise, word web-design is used to describe the front part (visible part) of a website, while web development takes care of functionality and backend of a website (coding part).

History of web and web design

While web design is a relatively new branch of business, it can be related to graphic design. Year 1989, while working at CERN, Tim Berners Lee announced creating global hypertext transport protocol, which later got more popular name World Wide Web (W3, WWW), and in the period from 1991 to 1993, the World Wide Web was created.

Mark Andreessen and Erik Bina made Mozaic browser back in 1993. There were a lot of different browsers back in the day, and most of them were made for Unix platform, and web pages were highly saturated with text. There was no support for graphic elements like images or sounds, and Mosaic was made to overcome that.

The W3C was founded in October 1994, so it could «lead WWW to its full potential through development of assembled protocols, and secure its interoperability». This discouraged companies to take monopoly on program languages and browsers. Year 1994 Andreessen founded the company «Netscape Communications» which made their own HTML tags without traditional standardization process. For example, Netscape 1.1 had commands for changing background color and text formatting to charts. During 1996-1999 the first browser wars have begun. Two leading companies, Microsoft and Netscape were fighting for most popular browser on the market. During this period, there were a lot of new technologies in this area, especially with CSS, JavaScript and dynamic HTML.

Evolution of web design

Year 1996. Microsoft announced their first competitive browser which had its own characteristics and tags. It was also the first browser which supported list of different CSS. Chart tags were first used for showing charts and data, but soon designers figured out potential of using HTML charts for creating complex multicolumns and a formation that was not possible until then. At that time, the most attention went into web design and esthetics, and very small amount of attention was on semantic and web accessibility. HTML sites were already limited in its designer’s capabilities, and even more with previous versions of HTML. To create complex projects, web designers had to use complicated chart structures, and even use an empty GIF image to leave a blank space in chart cells. Official CSS rules were accepted in December 1996. And this lets HTML code to be more semantic than presentation, and in that way improve web accessibility. During that period, Flash was developed (previously known as Futuresplash). At the start, it was a simple look tool, and it was letting web designers go beyond standard HTML code in that moment.

End of first wars

During 1998, company Netscape published NetscapeCommuncator under open source license, in that way, letting thousands of programmers involve in improving the software. Meanwhile, they decided to stop its development and start from scratch. That year, web-standardization project was formed, and it was promoted HTML and CSS compatibility. 2000 was a big year for Microsoft, Internet Explorer was released for Mac, and this was significant, because it was the first browser supporting HTML 4.01 and CSS 1, increasing its compatibility. It was also the first browser that supported PNG images. In this period, Netscape was sold to AOL, and it was considered like an official defeat in the browser wars.

Tools and technologies

Web designers are using a different set of tools depending on the processes they are involved. This tool was updated by time to support newer standards and software versions, but principles remained. Web and graphic designers are using vector and raster graphics for creating images for web or prototype design. Technologies for creating a website that is used today involves standardized tags that could be written by hand or WYSIWYG software.

Typography

Successful website has only several typography, fonts which are similar, instead of using a lot of different fonts. It is recommended to use Sans Serif or Serif fonts, but not both. Web site typography should also be carefully arranged. Most of browsers recognize and support a number of default fonts, and designers like to use them to avoid trouble. Most of parts on the website contains delimiters with goal to divide text by paragraphs, and to leave more user friendly web site.

Appearance

Web sites should be properly organized to improve usability for visitors. One of the crucial factors about web design is the web site’s with, because of arranging inner web page elements. Most of the web sites have a width of 1024 pixels, with text and images in the center, so it would appear better on larger screens.

Responsive web design is a new approach, based on CSS3 standards, and it has a deeper level of specifications by element outside cascade style of the web page, with better use of CSS media pseudo-selectors.

Code quality matters

When creating a website, the best practice would be adjusting to standards. This involves coding errors and assumption that identificators and classes will recognize each other in a proper way. That is usually done using the description of the element’s function. Creating a website, and not going with standards, can be a really bad idea, because it can make your website unusable. The standards are there because of proper web page’s schedule, design and to ensure that coded elements are closed in a proper way. Checking with V3C validator can be done only when proper declaration of web page (DOCTYPE) is finished, which is used to find coding errors in certain lines of a code. The system determines errors and areas which doesn’t fit to web design standards, and this information can be altered after.’)

Visual identity and design

The web site looks should be adjusted to target group that is planned. This could be age group or special view on a culture that designer should understand, so he could visually reflect that. Designers should also understand client, his company and the field of business so they would know what type of website they need. Esthetics and final design of the web site should never be in conflict with content or anything else, so users could find information or products they came for as fast as possible.

To understand web site itself, the most important thing would be to understand the way it works. User experience like understanding web site’s message, well organized elements must be crystal clear for all users, especially if you want that visitor to come back. More experienced users usually have a better understanding about website functionality, and if they find your web site useful, they will come back. Less experienced users will not see the advantages or flaws that often.

The web designer should be focused on good design and that both, experienced and non experienced user will find information they need.

What is web design? Here’s what 5 web designers have to say

Web design can mean different things to different people — we chatted with some of our favorite designers to hear their takes.

Web design has become one of the most ubiquitous parts of modern life.

Today, the average American spends just over seven hours a day online, and Google — the most visited site on the web — gets 89 billion visits per day. We see and interact with hundreds of web pages a day — for work, for entertainment, and for running our daily lives.

Web design is what makes every single one of those online interactions work, but web design itself is surprisingly hard to define. What is web design? Is it art? Is it graphic design? Is it user interface or user experience design? Are coding and engineering an essential part of web design? What about search engine optimization, accessibility, and copywriting?

At its simplest, web design is the art of designing sites for the web. But that definition falls short of describing the true scope of a web designer’s work. There are so many ways to answer that question. To learn more, we spoke with five experienced web designers to get their perspectives on the work they do.

Our designers:

Mark Johnson, founder and designer at BudBud

Catherine Foster, founder and creative director of Treadaway

Nathan Huening, solutions engineer at Webflow

Johnnie Gomez, senior brand designer at Webflow

Web design is any design on a website, regardless of device

Where do web design and product design begin? When does web design become mobile? Is it still web design if your mobile app is just a webview container? Or are you a mobile app designer now? Arguably, any design on a website, regardless of device, is web design. What it is beyond that is up to you. Technically anyone publishing something to the web is a designer. To what caliber is up for debate.

— Mark Johnson, founder and designer at BudBud

When attempting to define something, sometimes it’s best to start with the most direct answer. Web design is designing for the web. The openness of this definition is exactly what makes it so appropriate for the way we build for the web today. Mobile web, apps, and responsive design are all inherent parts of web design, and a definition that avoids those is going to miss a huge chunk of what designers actually do.

In 2022, web design means designing responsive websites.

We are no longer making static pages for use on one device exclusively. Every site needs to be adaptable to be viewed across different devices in different formats and contexts. For a lot of users, mobile may even be the primary or only way they’re accessing your site.

So if designing any site published on the web is web design, how do we differentiate web design as a craft? What makes web design good? “The annoying answer is — it depends. The simple answer is — if it works, can it be considered good?” says Mark, “Can the person using your website or product do what they’re trying to do? If so — great.”

Web design is the solution to a problem

A design can be good for one function but terrible for another, and vice versa. As an example, a beautiful website could have zero sales, and an undesigned or unpolished eCommerce could be bringing thousands of dollars in per day, so what is the criteria for something being good or bad? Maybe some of the questions that should be asked are: What is the main objective of the site? Is the design chosen helping with that or getting in the way?

— Johnnie Gomez, senior brand designer at Webflow

Websites exist to serve specific functions. They may be commercial — intended to sell products or subscriptions and convert visitors to customers. They may be informational — designed to educate or communicate specific information to an audience. Ultimately, web design serves a specific purpose.

Web design incorporates UI and UX design to be effective for users. It integrates search engine optimization so the right audience can actually find your site. Web design studies the way users move through the website and uses those insights to more effectively serve its intended purpose. Web design connects users to their needs by creating easy flows through their site, for example from the homepage to a call to action.

Catherine Foster, founder of Treadaway, sums it up simply: “Web design..resolves a problem.” Effective web design requires the ability to understand a user’s needs, anticipate how a user will experience your site, and design an experience that feels effortless and meets their needs.

The purpose of art is to ask questions, while the purpose of design is to answer them. Good design, whether web or otherwise, solves a problem well. Is this thing easy to find? Easy to learn about? Easy to purchase? Easy to discover and communicate? The design solution itself can “look” however you want; that’s the style.

— Nathan Huening, solutions engineer at Webflow

From the fundamentals to advanced topics — learn how to build sites in Webflow and become the designer you always wanted to be.

Web design is a delightful little balance of beauty and function

Catherine expands on her description of web design, adding that in her opinion, “function should be prioritized and then accented by beauty…bad web design would be where a designer doesn’t take into account accessibility or where an aesthetics-first site makes a user frustrated as they try to navigate.”

Web designers use all the tools in an artist’s toolkit — color, shape, proportion, pattern. While most websites are commercial and designed for specific purposes, web design is still a form of visual communication. To convey meaning to an audience, web designers use the visual tools at their disposal. When defining what web design is, it’s impossible to separate the aesthetic parts of the craft from the purpose the design is meant to serve.

Web design is fun

Good design also has a sticky aspect: it’s relevant, draws the user in, and even gives them something to play and interact with to tell the story of the product, highlight a benefit, or illustrate a feature. Good design is also FUN. It should leave your customer feeling like the solution offered is a breath of fresh air, and the product is a clear choice to solve their problem.

— David Cullington, Webflow designer

Web design, by nature, creates something that’s interactive. Communication is not a one-way process. It is an engaged two-way dialogue between you and your audience. For your site to be successful, users need to want to actively explore it. You need them to click on that button, scroll down the page, explore your menus, and browse your galleries. Web design brings an element of curiosity and playfulness to a website that engages your audience more deeply.

Flashy animations and effects on their own can’t elevate a poorly thought-out design, but if the underlying structure is solid, they can take a website to the next level. It’s easier than ever to design interactions for websites. You can incorporate page transitions, hover effects, and menus that respond to the user’s cues. Even the smallest reaction to your mouse can create that “sticky-ness” that David mentions.

Experiment, play around with it, and entertain yourself with what you’re making

Design is creative. It can be so much fun to do. Experiment, play around with it, and entertain yourself with what you’re making. Bringing fun into the mix will make you a better designer and help you craft more interesting websites. If you delight and intrigue your audience, your websites will be effective.

Web design is all about typography

95% of the information on the web is written language. It’s only logical to say that a web designer should get good training in the main discipline of shaping written information — in other words: typography. Optimizing typography is optimizing readability, accessibility, usability(!), and overall graphic balance. Organizing blocks of text and combining them with pictures…Isn’t that what graphic designers, usability specialists, information architects do?

— «Web design is all about typography,» iaNet blog, October 19, 2006

The art of web design is at its heart a mastery of typography. The iA net essay on the subject was a hot topic of conversation in the web design community when it was published (as was the follow-up piece). According to iANet. “It’s about communication, communication and not effects — that’s what we should be concerned about as designers.”

If the core of web design is communication, the text on a website is doing the majority of that work. While web designers may not be writing copy, the work they do to make sure the text is legible and conveys the information it needs to is crucial. Accessibility is also an important part of a web designer’s job, and formatting text is one of the biggest parts of making a website accessible to all users.

If the core of web design is communication, the text on a website is doing the majority of that work

Designers Cameron Moll and Jim Nielsen describe the ideal approach to typography as “text as user interface.” By treating text as UI, you can use your design choices to communicate the hierarchy of your information and make your site communicate more clearly to your users.

Typography is also a powerful visual design tool. Choice of font is part of that, as is the relationship between font choices. But typography is about much more than font. Font size, spatial relationships, colors, kerning, spacing, and weight all create a visual impact just as strong as photographs and illustrations.

Web design is a never-ending process

Th(e) definition is inherently broad because we believe that websites aren’t built in a silo or in a single timeframe, but rather web design is an iterative and client and user engaged never-ending process. This might be an unpopular opinion, but I believe the most important aspect of web design is the ability to keep it relevant and updated without immense effort and monetary investment. Website owners should feel comfortable and excited by keeping their site up to date! In the same way social media sites have empowered their users to create great content, a website should encourage the same.

— Catherine Foster, founder and creative director of Treadaway

Web design is also set apart by how changeable your creations are. A website will rarely, if ever, be a fixed design. Information needs to be updated regularly. Content will grow over time. Features need to be added to keep up with the development of technology. The existence of internet archives like the Wayback Machine speaks to how quickly and frequently the contents of the web change.

A skilled web designer will build growth into their site design from the beginning. They will ensure it’s easy to make changes while keeping the integrity of their design intact. They will make it easy to add new content by creating templates for pages that need to be frequently repeated, such as blog posts or case studies.

Designers creating commercial sites for clients have an even greater need to design sites that can be built up over time. Businesses need to be able to update their strategies and keep their web presence fresh and exciting for customers. Templatized pages, design systems, an organized CMS, clean CSS classes, and no-code tools that empower your clients to build and maintain the website you designed are all part of a professional web designer’s arsenal.

Web design is something everybody can do

Web design should be something everybody can do that wants to express an idea online. It’s about picking an appropriate mix of technology, messaging, and user experience to express an idea, build awareness, create a connection, help people manage aspects of their life, find information, or lead someone to take a particular action.

— David Cullington, Webflow designer

If web design is how people express ideas on the web, it should be a mode of expression open to everyone. In the early days of the internet, it was fairly easy to learn the tools needed to design a website. “When I first got into web design in 1999, it only took a few months of playing with Dreamweaver to learn the majority of the web designer’s toolkit,» recalls Vlad Magdalin, who went on to found Webflow fourteen years later.

As sites became more advanced and mobile web more ubiquitous, the barrier to entry for web designers became higher. Programming languages are now more complex than ever, and they’re needed to design to the level of sophistication expected of professional websites today.

In the future, designers will rule the web, and building for the web will be accessible to anyone who wants to try

The emergence of no-code platforms like Webflow made web design more accessible to a wider audience of creators than ever before. “Webflow has helped democratize this,” says David. «Where once you needed a room full of specialists, now you can create beautiful responsive designs, complex interactions, and polished user experiences.»

Tools with visual interfaces are merging the work that was once split into design and development and freeing programmers to focus on more complex coding challenges. In the future, designers will rule the web because building for the web has become accessible to anyone who wants to try.

What is web design (and how do I get it right)?

A website’s a website, right? Wrong. An outdated, confusing or broken website will hurt your brand. We’re not saying it might hurt your brand, we’re saying it will hurt it.

So how can you set yourself up to succeed? You can create an awesome website by totally nailing your web design from the beginning. But what is web design, actually? Read on if you want to learn what web design is all about, why it matters so much and how to get it right.

What is web design?

Web design is what creates the overall look and feel when you’re using a website. It’s the process of planning and building the elements of your website, from structure and layout to images, colors, fonts and graphics.

Web design has numerous components that work together to create the finished experience of a website, including graphic design, user experience design, interface design, search engine optimization (SEO) and content creation. These elements determine how a website looks, feels and works on various devices. Check out this in-depth guide on building a website, if you want to learn more about the whole process.

Web design is different from web development, which is the actual coding that makes a website work. When you’re building a website, you need both web design and web development. Although you can find web designers who are also web and UX developers, these are distinct skill sets.

Here’s what your website will look like in its earliest stages. Via Hal Gatewood.

Web designers take your ideas and turn them into a mockup that shows what your future website will look like. Web designers handle the creative part of designing a website.

Web developers—also sometimes called engineers or coders—take the mockup your web designer made and translate it into a coding language so it can be displayed on the web. They make websites functional, which often means custom-coding widgets and other tools.

A user experience developer, also known as a UX developer, is the one who makes your website user-friendly. They have technical skills as well as design skills and put them to work creating websites that attract and keep visitors.

Why is web design important?
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First impressions really matter. We can’t stress this point enough: if you don’t have a strong web presence, you’re holding your brand back.

Prospective customers who search the web for your brand and find nothing might think you’ve gone out of business. If they search and find something subpar, they’ll get the impression that you don’t care much about your company or product. Make every relationship that begins on your website a great one by getting your web design right.

Now that you know what’s what and who’s who, let’s look at some tell-tale signs of great web design and what distinguishes it from not so great web design.

What does good web design look like?
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Good web design isn’t subjective. With other types of design, like illustration or sticker design, a lot of what constitutes “good” is up to the viewer’s taste. With web design, the line between “good” and “not good” is much more defined. A well-designed website is a website that perfectly creates the experience your visitor is looking for.

Web design by Adam Bagus

Web design that works is web design that converts. In webspeak, “convert” means getting the user to take a specific action. When a user follows through with an action that your website set them up to take, your website made a conversion. Conversions can be anything, like signing up for a newsletter, making a purchase, opening an account or accessing more content on the website.

Effective web design brings a few different elements together to promote conversions. These include:

If you don’t think aesthetic design choices affect conversions, think again. Your website must be attractive—especially to your prospective user, so try to figure out what style is going to speak to them.

Invest in eye-catching images that work with your brand. Stay away from obvious stock photography. Learn more about using stock images here.

Remaining true to your brand is key to successful website design. Even the most gorgeous website is useless if it doesn’t match your brand.

Other building blocks of an effective web design are:

Of course, good web design isn’t just utilitarian. Visitors like websites that are engaging and fit the brands’ aesthetics. No matter how you achieve it, meshing an on-brand, engaging look with design elements that convert is how you win at web design.

Web design: what doesn’t work
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We’ve gone over what good design is. Now let’s talk a bit about what it isn’t.

As a general rule, visitors shouldn’t have to do any work to use your website. The whole experience of using your website should be straightforward and intuitive.

Here are some examples: Clear calls to action are great web design; murky ones are bad web design. High contrast fonts are smart, effective web design; low contrast fonts that are hard to read are poor web design.

Here are a few other elements to avoid:

Certain web design elements, like grid layouts, aren’t inherently good or bad choices. They can be used in effective and ineffective ways, so taking care to do them right is a must.

Another tricky web design element is animation. It’s not 1999 anymore, you shouldn’t have a comet tail trailing the user’s cursor or make them scroll past a row of dancing hamsters to get to your content. But an animated exit pop-up that brings visitors’ attention back to your site and gets them to convert? Yes.

How to get web design done
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Whew, getting web design right is a complex process and there are lots of things to look out for. Thankfully, you don’t have to do it alone. When you’re working with a professional web designer you can rely on their skill to get the perfect result.

Web design by Ananya Roy

There are a few different ways you can get the website you need. The way that’s right for you and your company depends on how complex of a website you need, how much you want to spend and how much of the work you can do yourself.

You can work directly with a freelance web designer. Simply browse designer portfolios and pick the designer you like best and who fits the style and look you’re going for. A freelance designer can customize an existing template or design a completely fresh template for your website. If you want your website built from scratch, you can work with a freelancer who has the skills to make it happen.

If you need help coming up with ideas for your website design, host a contest. On a platform like 99designs you can host a design contest by providing a brief and having designers submit designs based on your specifications.

Creating your own site with a template-driven website builder (like Wix or Squarespace) is also an option. You’ll need to be more hands on and if you’re not a designer you will be limited to what these platforms offer, but you can always hire a designer to customize a template for you.

You can also work with an agency that builds custom websites. Pick this option if you need to build a complex website from the ground up, but be aware that this end-to-end solution will cost you more.

Web design by DSKY

Be prepared to invest in high quality web design. Your web design could cost a few hundred to tens of thousands of dollars, depending on its complexity. What you’ll spend is proportionate to what you need.

So how do you know if you need a custom-built website or if a template will do you just fine? That all depends on what you need your website to do and what you plan for it. If scaling is part of your business plan, get a custom website. If you need it to be search engine friendly, if you need to adapt it to various business needs, if you have very specific ideas about the website that demand that it be built to your specifications, you need a custom website. When these aren’t priorities for you and you don’t have a large budget, a customized template is the way to go.

Creating a website that works
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By taking a hands-on role in your website’s design process, you’ll guarantee that you’ll get a website that meets or exceeds your expectations. Tell your web designer about your brand, your voice and what you plan to achieve with the website. The more information they have, the more equipped they are to deliver the perfect web design for you. Explain your vision to them and then let them work their magic.