nothing and everything

… is like it used to be.

Web design hasn't evolved much over the last 20 years or so. Maybe websites – generally speaking – look more slick now than before, but that doesn't help much to keep them apart and grade them designwise when all use the same limited number of solutions and follow the same trends.

We humans sure haven't come far since designing stonehenge, even with our improved scisels and hammers.

good art – bad art – no art…

One can see web design as an artform, and there are quite a few good – even some great – designs around. As with all other artforms; there are of course more bad than good designs around, and there are literally millions of copy-cat designs to be found.

If you like the look/feel of a page/site, and it works, it is probably OK – designwise at least. If designers have to explain why this or that miniscule detail makes a design stand out above the crowd, it probably isn't worth our time – good designs can stand on their own.

Of course; most people couldn't care less about web design as artform. Anyone and his dog is a designer, and a design can be built up in no time using bought and borrowed bits and pieces.
It is good so, as it means we all can find ways to express ourselves in unique ways even if nearly all our creations look like they are produced at assembly-lines – which most actually are.

As for content … well, I really shouldn't go there…
… too many sites only slip in a pretty thin, regurgitated, soup they call “content” in order to serve us massive amounts of ads and third party intrusions. Not worth further commenting.

minimalism … hmmm…

“Minimalism” and “minimalism” have two different meanings to me when I'm talking about web design.

What I sell to customers are “simplistic visual designs” that provide them with plenty room for whatever they want to populate their sites with. Standard chunks of code that are easy to update and modify by anyone, work well on most sites.

What I play around with on my own sites is different, in that I can go quite a few rounds behind the scene – in the code – to achieve a minimalistic appearance.
This is after all my very personal playground, where I can test out more complex ways to achieve anything, everything and nothing. Maybe even add another shade of gray here and there now and then, and pretend it matters.

sincerely georg; sign

Hageland 12.jun.2016
last rev: 12.jun.2016

side notes.

then, and now…

Visual designs were originally meant to catch our attension the moment we arrived on sites, and keep us there long enough to let the site-owners show us whatever it was they wanted to present. Thus, having a good design mattered a great deal in olden days.

These days most professional site-owners are only in it to make money by selling unlimited access to their visitors to third parties, so the actual design matters less and less as targeted ads (that take forever to download) take over our screens and cover up what little visual design there is on a site.

reality-check…

Most people are already blind to ads on old-style organized web pages, and ad-blocking plug-ins can keep out most of that stuff anyway these days. So, there's a kind of standoff between site-owners who want to draw in more ad-related business, and visitors who don't want to be disturbed by ads while trying to check out content.

There is no way sites can force vigilant visitors to accept ads and all that follows, and there isn't a single site online that serves so important content and/or services that people cannot get around and find what they want without visiting the most aggressive sites.

Some web-users will of course get used to and accept whatever even the worst web sites serve, and these resigning visitors may be in high enough numbers to “legitimise” quite aggressive business models.

The “smell of money” can make even the most rational people do the most awful things, and general public docileness allows them to flood us with what we neither need nor want.

the future?

The web will evolve in all directions – for better and for worse – and web design trends will go in endless circles like everything else. There is already so much of the same going on on the web that I'm losing interest in keeping track of it all.

Just like we're running into information overload, we are also running into ad overload and design overload. Individuals will focus more and more on what they are interested in or can make a profit of, and shut out all else as if it doesn't exist.

Instead of sharing stuff over the internet, the internet will be used as if it consists of closed and encrypted channels – which it already does to a degree – where individuals try to stay in contact only with groups of like-minded people.
That won't work of course, as “big brother” and a lot of other “brothers” want full access to everything. That people gather in uniform groups only makes the almighty brothers' tasks of conditioning us all for intrusion overload so much easier.

As can be seen by all interested parties: an interesting, and challenging, future in all ways imaginable awaits us, and most of that future is already here and not looking too good. Maybe it is time for a redesign…