Web Designers Please Stop Doing This

We’re at a point where it’s time to stop calling ourselves web designers and to start thinking of ourselves simply as designers. That’s the only way we’re going to be taken seriously as a profession, and stop following all these ridiculous trends.

Everywhere you look these days sites using some variation of the above template are getting accolades. What is wrong with us?

I have been kicking around my general gripes about the state of “design” in web design for a while now but wasn’t inspired to write an article until I saw Paul Scrivens’ Smashing Magazine Killed the Community, and was in almost complete agreement.

Where is the value in compiling other people’s content or screenshots of their sites offering no additional input other than to regurgitate it as your own for the sake of a few Diggs? And where is the credibility in these Top 10 Crazy Ass Things to Do With Type sites anyway? Have you ever seen a truly reputable designer you know writing for them? And now they’re selling you a book. All these sites do is glorify trends and cliches.

This got me to thinking, whatever happened to the CSS galleries of yore? Now there are scores of them, all the featured sites with the same cookie cutter layout. I don’t think the problem is as Paul said, that CSS galleries were something easy to replicate. I think the problem is one of content. These sites aren’t scouring for anything pushing boundaries, they passively accept suggestions and post accordingly. Now that people with dollar signs in their eyes are flocking to the industry in droves, an appetite for this garbage has been cultivated.

I can understand how sites like this might be good reference for someone just beginning their career, a starting point to see what’s been done before, but they become dangerous when they preach trends as gospel and all of a sudden every new site on the internet looks the same. Remember Web 2.0? Where did all those designers go? Gradients, drop shadows and rounded corners gave way to Photoshop effects, mismatched social media icons and poorly executed grunge type. Do we really want to be the David Carsons of the web industry, slowly becoming caricatures of ourselves? Once upon a time we had wonderful places to go for web inspiration, like Stylegala.

Now it’s time to stop looking at the web for inspiration. So many people in this industry do not come from a design background, we need to get back to design basics. Design school 101. Real typography, not just “picking out a cool font”. Grids, and not out of the box solutions, but thinking about a real working grid for our sites. Using an out of the box grid is equivalent to using an out of the box Wordpress template with no regard to how it fits your content at all. Color. Strip away Photoshop techniques. Software is just a tool, designs should be able to survive without effects and shadows. Stop designing your content for your CMS and work the other way around. Want to learn about storytelling? Take a comic book illustration class, even if you can’t draw.

You’re not going to find a quick solution for good design in a top ten list. Real design is hard, that’s why we expect to be paid well for it. Stop listening to people spend a lot of time talking about web design but doing very little design themselves, and instead go back to real designers. Start at the beginning. Start at Bauhaus. Start at De Stijl. Start at military propaganda art. Start anywhere but with freaking web design.

P.S. Can we please stop doing this also? This is like lens flare part two.

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Hello World.

It only took eight months, but I finally got around to posting my new site. Now with 100% more Cufon and Barbara Kruger. I had to stop pushing pixels and start designing.

In January I vowed not to post to my site again until it was redesigned. I tossed up an interim homepage so I wouldn’t be laughed out of SXSW and called it a day. I was having a block. I thought I wanted a site reflecting my attention to detail and skills as an icon designer. For a while I thought I wanted Jason Santa Maria’s site. I thought I wanted to pull all my digital errata from various corners of the web. I thought I wanted to make rad new icons for the occasion.

I got caught up in the details, and noodling around, I lost sight of what I really wanted; bold, dramatic and simple. Constraint is the best way to foster creativity, so I set some ground rules: broad strokes, one primary color per section, a single typeface (though multiple fonts for different uses were acceptable) and no tchotchkes.

No icons, I don’t need them. No social media junk drawer. No last 5 Flickr photos, and no latest tweet which is probably an @reply to someone you don’t know anyway. None of the latest trends vomited out into a top 5 list on some design blog somewhere. (I hope, I don’t read them.)

I realized I could make things even easier on myself if I emulated another artists’ style. Not only could this prove an interesting experiment, (maybe Mondrian next?), but made most of the visual decisions for me. I’ve always been into to Futura, and Futura and Barbara Kruger go hand in hand. It just seemed the right way to go.

Suddenly after getting rid of everything that was holding me back (including IE), I had a site.

Oh yeah, I’ve got a store now. Eventually there will be more stickers and buttons, and if interest is there, some shirts too. I’m getting back to my illustration roots, so it’s not out of the realm of possibilities prints might make their way into the store. Last but not least, I am launching a comic. Stop by next week, I’m hoping to have it up by Thursday at the latest, it will be published every Tuesday and Thursday after that.

If you see some weirdness in the next couple weeks it’s just me cleaning up, I am still getting a handle on Expression Engine and attempting to tame my .htaccess and get rid of index.php in my URLs.

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