From Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 and beyond…(yawn)
Design, of course, is much more than web design, but no doubt you’ve already discovered that teh Netz is eating up as many designers as you can throw at it (om nom nom) and still hungers for more.
Personally, I sometimes miss the days when the phrase “web design” was itself an oxymoron — the days when it was up to programmers alone to make the Internet look halfway decent. Some had design training, some had instinctive talent, and many just didn’t care how it looked…as long as it loaded in an hour or less and didn’t crash.
Now we have so many options that simply choosing between what is already available can be an overwhelming creative endeavor, let alone developing good design from scratch.
Which brings up a good point to think about: why are so many web pages so similar in appearance?
Is it the “Anna Karenina rule” (“All happy families resemble one another, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”)? Is there really only one best way (granted, with many distinct variations) to design a site?
Terribly designed websites have a certain charm, if they actually work. I’ve seen at least one site that was proud to have received and ugliest site on the web award…though the traffic that went along with the award could certainly have influenced the satisfaction.
Or is it simply that imitation is far more promising a route to success than innovation? By and large, the web is not over-stuffed with uniquely creative people (gasp!).
There are a handful of real artists, a major city’s worth of talented and creative design ‘engineers’ and ‘tweakers’ (in the knob-twiddling sense, rather than the illicit drug-using sense!), and then millions of assorted copycats, hacks, disinterested jobbers, and assorted cobblers.
If you, like me, belong closer to the bottom of that list than the top, you’ll probably benefit from browsing these pages. And if you’re closer to the top, stop wasting your time and go back to making our world a more beautiful place!