I’ve been designing on the web since at least 1998, but I’ve only been designing in anger (i.e. for money) since 2009. So in one sense, my understanding has the depth borne from emerging from the early days of CSS and having been through the thick of the browser wars. In another sense, my understanding has the breadth borne from intense, self-directed learning and experimentation as well as client work.

Yet, I’m still coming to terms with just how unique the canvas that I as a web designer am presented with on a daily basis.

Lost in Middle

Part of that is likely due to the fact that I’m not, in proper terms, a programmer and so I don’t yet have a full grasp of what’s technically possible. That said, I know a lot of programmers who can’t design their way out of a paper bag; it’s like their bias for bare function blinds them to the fact that a site needs to be used by another human being.

I’m also not a classically trained designer, which presents limits in how approach the layout and aesthetics of a site. Yet – again – I know a lot of excellent designers who simply can’t translate their skill to the web; they understand neither the constraints nor the possibilities of the medium.

So I guess I’m somewhere in the middle. I’m in a switch hitter with a fair amount of expertise on either side.

Even so, I’m still coming to grips (as are many of the world’s top web designers) with just what we’re dealing with.

In recent years, there have been movements away from fixed layouts and pixel values, or any notion of designing for a particular web context. It’s kind of a Zen perspective, one which requires that you strip away any assumptions, expectations, or precepts; everything else is fashion.

Magnum vs. Blue Steel

Fashions can be important, but should never be foremost. For one thing, fashions are temporary and therefore don’t age well. For another, fashions become conventional or improperly applied, stifling creativity in either user experience or visual design.

Consider the usual Header/Content/Sidebar/Footer format as a go-to format for layout. This once insightful solution provided a highly usable format for organizing content and function. But it has now become so routine that usability studies reveal (and have revealed for some time) that typical website users immediately scan a website according to this format (known as the ‘F’ pattern). Not only that, this layout convention has become baked right into the most recent iteration of the HTML specification as <header>, <article>, <aside>, and <footer> elements.

Also consider the proliferation of so-called ‘Web 2.0’ aesthetics of smooth pseudo-physical buttons, high-contrast color palettes, ‘shiny’ gradients, beveled edges, and so on. You know the look. This engaging design pattern once provided a fresh and much-needed new approach to a flat and graphically inert internet marked by hard-edged grey boxes, mind-numbing type solutions, and blue, underlined hyperlinks.

And now consider parallax scrolling, desaturated photography, and other aspects of what is being billed (erroneously, faddishly) as HTML5 design. While these patterns have their place, they are already becoming fashionable and therefore (yes, therefore) inappropriately applied.

While such once-inventinve-then-fashionable-now-conventional patterns can drive usability by virtue of their familiarity, they also belong in the lazy designer’s toolkit. They prevent the Zen perspective required for designing content-first, user-focused, and (equally important for client work) identity appropriate web experiences.

sic semper erat, et sic semper erit

It should go without saying – but I feel compelled to mention it – that this is not something unique to web design. Every discipline is plagued by this cycle. You could say that it is the nature of things.

However, the fact that the world’s most respected and experienced web practitioners are wrestling with this issue signals that web design has matured to the point where we can to confront these issues. I like that, because it is one more grunt toward legitimacy.