Recently I have come to the conclusion that current trends in web design are causing a complete lack of creativity. The whole “Web 2.0” design movement (if you can call it that) has already caused its damage. What do I mean by damage? While many people believe that these trends in web design have increased the importance of design in the eye of our users and clients. I however believe that this is not true. All that has been accomplished is that these people have developed a false perception of what good design is. So what does this mean? It means that we as designers now have a new hurdle to overcome. We must now fight even harder to effectively meet their communication needs. In addition to the typical requests for bigger logos and larger type, now we must fight to stray outside the world of glossy buttons, and reflected logos.
How do we combat these trends?
The only way that we are going to be able to make any progress beyond these clichéd aesthetic choices is to inform our clients and try to eliminate these items from our designs. Additionally we can make an effort to fill our portfolios with work that does not reflect these stereotypical aesthetic choices. We should combat the effects of influences on our work such as design galleries that encourage similarity and perpetuate bad design practices (see my article on the subject). Finally, we should encourage our clients to trust our judgment, and select clients who are looking to be different, not follow the crowd.
Where do we turn?
I believe that we should return to our roots. We should stop looking to the solutions that have been done already on the web and look at print design. We can use the practices of print design such as typography, illustration, and rhythm and infuse them with the vertical format of the web. Most importantly of all we can use tools such as context, vernacular and symbolism to create great concepts that evoke emotion and instill meaning in the copy.
So the next time you approach a web design, instead of browsing your bookmarks for you favorite web design “inspiration” site, instead pick up a copy of HOW, Print, or Communication Arts. Even better yet, grab some graph paper and a pencil and sketch some thumbs. In the end your project will only benefit from your exploration of the atypical.
AssociaDirect – The Association Agency
HellYeahDude.com
WordPress theme's for designers
Digg for Designers
Barackas.com – Barack Obama Maraccas
Flash Components
3 Months $20 
January 22nd, 2008 at 5:49 am
Nice thought! This does bring a new outlook on how to approach a new project. But I am wondering if even I have been caught up in the “stereotypicalness” of design. Does this mean that being “glossy” in any project is being non-creative? I design for myself and what pleases my eye. What if that coincides with Web 2.0?
January 22nd, 2008 at 9:02 am
@ n9986
using one or two items in a design that would be typically considered part of the “web 2.0” style is not necessarily bad, however it is when this is all that you do that is become a problem.
Remember that just being pleasing to the eye is only a small portion of what designers do. We should also be problem solvers, and visual communication experts as well.
January 22nd, 2008 at 9:52 am
i think you are looking at the web 2.0 in a really supperficial way.
opening the web and giving people the power to generate their own content is the most powerfull and creative thing for everybody.
this is the best time to think as real designers. glossy buttons are just an output that obviously should be ignored.
what can’t be ignored is our responsability to bring structure to a whole new way of thinking in web terms. this might piss off some designers, cause it’s not about how many eye candy tricks you can use, it’s about approaching a problem in logical terms.
January 22nd, 2008 at 10:16 am
Daniel,
I agree that web 2.0 is about the programming and the the functionality that is given to the user. However I do not agree with the aesthetic that is all. I believe that you misunderstood what I was getting at.
The power that is given to the user is the innovative thing about web 2.0 not the crappy visuals.
January 22nd, 2008 at 10:28 am
I think you are being slightly narrow-sighted in your approach to the term “web design”. And only approaching this argument from a graphic design stand point.
while i whole heartedly agree with you that some graphical trends and devices become over used, i think we must see web design as much more than just how buttons look, or how big a logo is.
i’ve always though web design to be more like engineering or architecture.
While user driven sites (or web 2.0) appear very stale and unimaginative, we must consider what purpose these sites are being designed for. Their primary objective is to communicate content, and lots of it!
And the best way to communicate masses of content, is to keep it simple and uniform - creating standards and useable designs.
I don’t think the web is killing creativity in design. I think it is making designers approach web design from a different angle, where the visual aspect is not always the primary focus in terms of communication.
I also think there is a lack of traditionally trained “graphic designers” designing websites, who have little or no understanding of basic typography and layout skills
this is where your argument is more relevant.
- being able to write html and use photoshop does not make you a designer. My dad’s got photoshop and he worked for a bank!!
But there is plenty of creative work on the web. Consider the advances in video and flash technologies in recent years and see how that has brought us some truly “creative” web design.
developments in css and ajax like languages or recent years has also made the web a much more interesting place to be.
lets be optimistic!
January 22nd, 2008 at 10:35 am
“Design has been treated as how something looks – styling. I think that’s rather an old-fashioned concept.
I think design is about technology.”
James Dyson
Personally I think this is true of the web but good use of technology and good aesthetics can only improve the overall “design” of a website…
One also has to consider usability and the overall communication (as Zinni has mentioned!) to really gage weather a site is successful or not.
January 22nd, 2008 at 11:04 am
-> I also think there is a lack of traditionally trained “graphic designers” designing websites, who have little or no understanding of basic typography and layout skills <- Bingo!!!!
January 22nd, 2008 at 11:17 am
@ PXLated & Paul
I too agree that this is the greater problem, but rather than condemn these individuals I would rather argue in a way that could send them down the right path. At least that is what I was hoping to accomplish with this article.
January 22nd, 2008 at 4:26 pm
I disagree with this notion that web 2.0 is detrimental to our craft.
You mention that you are tired of seeing glossy buttons and the like which you see as de-valuing the thought and intention that goes into good design. Yet the thing is, people have always copied other people when it comes to style and aesthetic on the web. Just look back to a few years ago when everyone was doing grungy design and everything look beaten up or used. Then when flash started to hit it off a million people tried to be just like 2advanced and you saw lots of 45 degree angle lines and boxes and over the top flashy stuff. Type was restricted to 8pt pixel fonts that weren’t scalable and everything was in a table.
Now things are different. Im not arguing that copying is beneficial to design but if anything its leaps and bounds from where we’ve come from. Now the emphasis is on standards-based, accessible designs. Type is big and readable(and scalable on most sites) and there seems to be a lot more emphasis on the brand and the user rather then just trying to look cool.
Also, Last year saw a zillion blog articles on things like grid design, typography and many other traditional design techniques. Honestly i think you should just stop visiting the gallery sites and start looking at good design (which theres plenty of)
January 22nd, 2008 at 5:27 pm
Instead of beating your drum in cadence with the lemmings off the web 2.0 cliff, think back to and how quickly those holding the purse strings forced your hand into abuseing your better judegment. Lesson learned, You are the designer. You make the choices. Sounds to me that working on communication skills will allow you to Mapquest your way around that new superhighway billion hit pileup that got everyone yelling ‘whiplash’
January 23rd, 2008 at 9:52 am
Definitely, 95% of people don’t even understand that the Web is about information.
InformationArchitects.jp — — The web isn’t about making a good design, its about how your information is perceived and understood by your reader. That is design.
The Web 2.0 look is already 5 years ago, it’s going out. I am ready for Web 3.0 so I can erase all of my google tracks! hahaha
January 23rd, 2008 at 1:06 pm
I really appreciate the last point in your post. I wish there was more dialog happening between web and print design, and more dialog between print designers online. I write a blog about print design on a daily basis, and as a rule, nobody wants to talk or share ideas. I wonder, do print designers guard their craft jealously from the online world?
Going in the opposite direction, what’s really interesting is how, as of late, a lot of print design has been going all web 2.0-y. You can see this in the print collateral of some of the Presidential candidates, particularly Obama. So it seems that print design doesn’t want to play online, but web designers are happy to bring their philosophies to print. Hmm, evolve or die, anyone?
January 23rd, 2008 at 1:43 pm
@ Anne
Maybe the situation that you are explaining is the inability for these web designers to “shut off” the web 2.0 aesthetic when they do translate the project to print. I could easily see how becoming accustomed to designing in a certain way for the web would easily influence everything else such as identity, packaging, and print.
I just hope that I don’t walk into a room one day and see rounded corners on all the picture frames, and 50,000 coats of high gloss on all the surfaces… lol
February 6th, 2008 at 9:41 am
Needless to say all the engineering type, and those leaning that way, think that you are wrong, and that the web is about technology, interactivity, architecture or something like that. Nothing could be further from the truth. The web, with all its tech, is only about one thing - communication. And all the arts, and to some degree the sciences, of communication are what makes the web happen and what makes it such a profound opportunity for humanity - if we don’t let the corporate interests completely currupt it into a glitzy high tech Yellow Pages.
I have been in advertising/marketing for 40 years, and I can assure you more technology, faster technology and shinier technology has not changed human nature. What makes humans unique among mamme ls is our ability to communicate - and not just about where the food is - but about things that inspire us, fascinate us, motivate us, scare us and otherwise impact our lives. We share our lives with each other,interact together, talk with people we know and dance those we don’t. We do this with communication, which of course has always been interactive. And we do this best when we are creative - in word or in print, in writing or in scultpure - and yes, sometimes even in elegant coding or beautiful buildings. All the internet does is enhance our ability to share.
But the internet has done something else - allowing us to measure every click, every purchase, every search, and every minute we spend browsing. Aside from privacy considerations, this unprecedented level of data accumulation, combined with greed and profit motive, (temporarily I hope) has created a FALSE impression among “clients,” that they can measure their success. Data mining or Metrics, to use a buzzword, has supplanted creativity, for the moment, as King ,of the Internet Hill.
As a marketing guy, I have read dozens of pages daily for years on internet marketing. Almost none of it mentions creativity. All the “scientific” analysis of the data doesn’t even consider creativity a variable (after all, it cannot be measured easily). And with a significant variable missed, the science involved is all junk science. When the “content” is actually considered, it is just as part of a Taguchi test in which a thousand or ten thousand headlines, pictures and other variables are all tested to see which one performs best. Did you know that email capture forms work best when they have square corners, NOT rounded corners? True! But if you “believe” in the religion of that data (i.e., techno-bible, i.e., techno-babble) you will never again work up the courage to use rounded corners on a form. And that is when your creativity dies.
Is there some absolute fact of human nature that says rounded corners are not good for us? Do we intrinsically fear “rounded” corners? Perhaps it is genetic?
On the other hand, rounded corners are what we perceive in nature. It is the square corner that is unnatural. I have no idea what that means! Insofar as this one test, on one website, with a specific marketing strategy for a specific demographic, it probably means nothing. But try telling that to the new believers, those that think the internet is about an architecture or technology.
So, my response to all this is to late in life change my career. I have been a “creative” for decades, in both copy and graphics. But it won’t sell. Most clients won’t pay what it is worth (at least the one’s I have met) and the rest have unfulfillable expectations about what they want. I cannot compete with people who don’t realize that the quality and creativity of the “content” is the most important investment they can make in their website. They’re happy to invest tens of thousands of dollars in programming, but want to buy all their copywriting for $5 an article on outsourcing websites where I would have to (and did for a short while) compete with people in countries with a cost of living just a fraction of mine (from China and Latvia to Russia and Africa).
So instead, I have taken another passion of mine, raw natural food, and decided to make that my new business. I love writing about it, and unintentionally my old website (started in 1998) has become number one on many Google searches and has been one of the top raw food websites in terms of traffic - so I am turning that now into my business. I’ll be creative all I want on my own website, and nobody can tell me not to. That may be the only true creative outlet left for us…which may be why blogs are so popular. Anyway, you can find me there doing my thing.
- Robert Ross
February 7th, 2008 at 6:52 pm
Agreed…to most of this article. This is a good basic statement that points the finger at many out-of-the-box designs reaching the masses.
What the “web 2.0 movement” is doing is helping you realize that there is value in original thinking, in websites that go further than cookie-cutter designs and so the very few people finding distinct commonalities with their target market and designing/thinking “outside the square” to achieve their goal distinguishes them(us) from the rest. I don’t mind that the web 2.0 design ethos exists because I know I will always strive away from it where possible but using it when required. Say as a bad example for a website selling Viagra or the like.
Inspiration can begin with books and pencil and paper. But delving deeper into thoughts, behaviours and human interaction is where we need to look further into when thinking of future designs.
There’s a book I found inspiring and it’s “Designing Interactions” by Bill Moggridge. It looks into the thinking of purposeful design and should be in a web designer’s toolbox as a starting guide into thinking about approaching the next design project.
I hope that the matter of cutting costs does not enter freely into many web designer/developer minds as the solution to most web projects, but rather a starting point to move away from.
Necessity breeds invention. How do people want to communicate next?
Nice can of worms :)
February 10th, 2008 at 12:20 pm
Sorry to arrive so late to the conversation. The article and responses to it touch on something that I think has to be the next step in order for web design to mature. Yes, web 2.0 is about the user defined experience, but it has also taken on a “look”, right or wrong. The important thing is that it has helped to communicate effectively with end-users.
To advance design on the web I think there has to be an easy method to place fonts on a server and allow them to be used / viewed through the browser. The current list of “web safe” fonts is very restricting. I know there are methods to use “cool” fonts for headers etc (I do it), but until it becomes a simple part of the process there are going to be limits.
As far comparing Print to Web design I think there is a real significant difference. More and more my print designs (thankfully my clients allow this) incorporate texture to communicate the message. Paper is a significant part of the design. That can’t be achieved online.