What Leonardo Da Vinci Can Teach Us About Web Design — Smashing Magazine

Exhaustive, sometimes bizarre notes… wireframes… mind-bending blends of art and science. Is it a GitHub repository? No, it’s the life of a Renaissance genius. With the right lessons, we can all write some da Vinci code.

Web development is a pretty big tent. It encompasses color, mathematics, accessibility, typography, photography, copywriting, ethics, and the list goes on and on. The web is a near-infinite world which — for all its relentless innovation and disruption — inherits many of its most beautiful qualities from old ways.

It is in that spirit that we’ll be looking at the Italian polymath Leonardo da Vinci, the latest in a rather eclectic lineup of old maestros I’ve had the pleasure of writing about:

Perhaps more than any other person in history, da Vinci showed the kind of magic that can happen in the overlap between art and science, where much of web development lives. His methods and outlooks are as applicable today as they were in Renaissance Italy.

Document Your Thoughts, Ideas, And Work

Da Vinci was a fastidious writer, producing tens of thousands of pages of notes and sketches during his life. Their content ranged from mundane to genius, and that was part of their value. One...