You Don’t Have Time to Complain
Enough About the State of Web Design
I’m not picking on anyone in particular but this was written originally in response to a post on thenextweb.com about how Web Design is Now Completely Boring — it was the straw that broke the camel’s back.
Enough with this mindless pablum. You’re too late. Not by days, weeks or months but, by years. Four years to be precise if you go by the publish date on Jonathan Longneckers article on Creative Bloq. You’re unnecessarily echoing the recent tsunami of designers whining about the loss of differentiation within your own design portfolio. No one cares. Seriously.
Gild the lily on your own time and your own budget. Have at it on your own portfolio, or your own blog. No one is preventing you from being creative, esoteric, or a unique voice on your own dime.
Sorry if we’re using off-the-shelf tools and eschewing Flash.
Welcome to 2015 — where more than half of your audience is mobile and on mobile devices.
Flash won’t run on mobile platforms, good luck convincing your next client to indulge in your nostalgia for retro tech. By your own admission you already realize this. The most telling phrase was the “Adobe’s Flash app was a single place to build those crazy ideas, even if it meant that creativity was at the expense of other things.”
Right now businesses, start-ups, and entrepreneurs need to be agile and we need to be everywhere. On multiple platforms, multiple OSes, ever-changing viewports, wearables, an ever-growing list of mobile devices and new horizons — be it a new TV set top box, a streaming platform, or something car-centric. All that matters is that our product, app or service works on all the platforms our audience/customers are using. It also needs to speak to a global audience and that might mean rendering in different languages — even ones that don’t use the English alphabet or characters you’re used to seeing on your own keyboard. Perhaps the design needs to support arabic or kanji characters. Perhaps it needs to be dynamic and allow for features such as flexible layouts.
Look beyond America. Is it a coincidence that recent breakouts in tools facilitating design and work innovation came from outside the US?
Atomic: Wellington, New Zealand
Canva: Sydney, Australia
Slack: Vancouver, Canada (before San Francisco, CA)
Sketch: Hague, The Netherlands
Zeplin: Istanbul, Turkey
Perhaps you also need to delve deeper than surface details. It is after all, about more than appearances. When was the last time you designed for a discussion experience, incorporated @mention capabilities, design/built a shopping platform, a checkout process, enhanced authentication, reengagement flows, optimized reading experiences, support for inline video, the embedding of third-party services, dynamic galleries, out bound messaging or systems that track activity, choices, favorites or a users history?
“Websites from small businesses to startups and giant companies have all started to use similar layouts and frankly, it’s boring.”
What?!! If you’re going to live in a glass house it’s best not to throw stones. If you’re really serious about this, charity begins at home — show me how you’d push the bounds on your own website and then maybe we can talk.
We live in a world where frameworks, programming languages, tools, HIGs and paradigms change daily. People are hacking their own solutions and 3D printing their own products. The future is coming at us a million miles a minute and it waits for no one, man or woman. The new frontier in computing will be seamless, immersive and even invisible — as it should be. It’s about the content not the chrome — aka cruft.
Faster than you can say Robopocalypse we’ll be immersed in VR, AR and AI. UX for these platforms need minimal UI. Where will you be then? Hopefully not within your own comfort zone, complaining about how boring web design has become. If you’re that bored, you’re looking for inspiration or fulfillment in all the wrong places.
Open your eyes, look to the future and realize you’ve got some catching up to do.
