Good Design is Ruining the Internet
When people complain about education today, they usually accuse teachers of “only teaching the test.” As I evolve into a bitter old man, I feel that with the popularity of some design patterns and frameworks, today’s web designers are only learning how to fill boxes. This has nothing to do with design education – just the medium of design itself. Popular patterns of responsive design that were once beautiful to me have become so commonplace that they’re boring.
In the mid-’90s, when I first started getting into web design, the web was more like an experiment. Most people had only “heard” of the internet, and a lot of my client meetings were spent explaining the concept of a hyperlink.
The web was uncharted territory, and there were hardly any rules to the medium. Our only guide was a woman named Lynda Weinman (lynda.com) who had written a couple of books on web design, how to transition color from print to web, and basic web layout fundamentals.
The web was new for everybody. It was a free-for-all of trial and error. It was chaos. But over time, it’s shifted from chaos to order.
The Rise of Design Patterns
Design is full of trends, and as the web grew, so did the popularity of certain design patterns. Design patterns are “solutions to software design problems you find again and again in the real world.” For instance, it’s pretty common to see a company’s logo in the upper left-hand corner of a webpage. It’s also pretty established that a navigation is best placed at the top, or in a left-hand sidebar on the page.
Design patterns become cultural norms that evolve over time. But just because a design pattern is popular doesn’t mean it always makes for good design. Remember the rise of the “Flash intro” on websites? That was a very popular design pattern and a cultural best practice for any “modern” website 15 years ago, until it was abandoned and the more current design pattern of never having an intro became popular.
There is nothing inherently wrong about any individual design pattern; the decision to accept or reject each one at any given time is mostly based on trends and preferences.
Some design patterns you can’t see. Not only has the web’s look changed, but the philosophy behind the code has changed as well. We’ve gone from caring only about how something is displayed in one browser and one screen size, to code that will function on multiple browsers, multiple versions of those browsers, and rearrange and scale itself to display optimally on any size screen. The now-shameful declaration of “works best in Internet Explorer 8 at 1024×768” that used to float above the footer has been replaced with hours and hours of design and development time.
Design Patterns Become Frameworks
As design patterns on the web become more and more popular, they frame our thinking about the medium. One I think the world has really embraced is the Bootstrap pattern.
Bootstrap is a design framework made by the good folks at Twitter that lets web designers use a fast, flexible grid system to build websites. It essentially serves as a template to get started, and is a very powerful, useful tool on the web. Bootstrap is filled with coding and design patterns and best practices already baked in, so a designer can spend more time thinking about the site’s content.
Bootstrap and similar frameworks are responsible for thousands of websites. Some of them are beautiful. Some of them, not so much. But by using the framework and best practices and established design patterns, you are starting off your project with “good design.”
And good design is ruining the internet.
When everyone uses a similar design pattern, websites all start to look the same. In a space where billions of websites are competing for their own unique identity, design patterns and templates are making them blend in more than stand out. In the pursuit of structure and order, we’ve become ordinary.
The web is the most inventive thing in the history of the world. It’s sad to think that its design is becoming limited to the pattern of “big header images and three columns of text with icons above them.” What we’re labeling as “good web design” is really just content in a template.
Design is a balance of order and chaos. It should be usable and functional, but it should also be exciting. I like to read older design books, like the work of Josef Müller Brockmann, who pioneered and popularized the grid system. Even 60 years after it was first published, his work can serve as inspiration for web design today. He uses grid systems to establish visual structure and order, and then does something to break that rhythm. The result is order and chaos working hand-in-hand.
The industry doesn’t have to settle for “good design,” when the web gives us a chance to make it great. Designers just need to throw a wrench in it every once in a while.
