Web Design Library has released an interview with German web design minimalist Dirk Hesse, whose CSS styled and XHTML structured website won WDL's “Usability of the Month” award in December of 2004. Among his fans, web design giant Jeffrey Zeldman once penned that Hesse's inimitable style is “clean and hard as three chord rock”.

To get an idea of the tone of our interview, read the excerpt found below:

WDL: If we understood you right, your philosophy is that “There are no dumb users and no bad browsers, but there is front-end design”. What led you to develop such a philosophy? When was the breaking point when you said, “OK, #@*^#$%, no more heavy tables and graphics!”?

Dirk Hese: It's "There are no dumb users, just badly designed sites (things)". People often feel ashamed when they cannot handle devices. I think that's a totally wrong approach. If they don't understand it, it's simply bad design. It's not people's duty to discover, it's the designer's duty to easily communicate. Take highway signs: almost no way to do something wrong. Or the Model One Radio. So easy to use. That's great design.

I don't like complicated things (save the Forever Changes album by Love) and I hate it when a design gets complicated because people put too much of their ego in it. Devices that do not work sometimes cause physical pain to me. It's embarrassing, but I once smashed my car radio when getting frantic about it. By the way, in my opinion, car radios are the most badly designed things of all. Very difficult to use – i.e. not understandable. Even for someone who doesn't have to maneuver a car at the same time. Too many options and tiny buttons with cryptic names. I never found out what the "ASI" and "mLu" buttons were good for. Ordinary radios do not have buttons like that, do they?

As to the tables: I think it was Zeldman's ALA article from 2001 or thereabout that made me move to tableless design and change my mind. However, I don't have problems with heavy graphics as long as they make sense.