When a web project is in the early days, a maintainable design is important, because it reduces the cost of change. Reading the comments to my post, I've seen a

When a web project is in the early days, a maintainable design is important, because it reduces the cost of change. Reading the comments to my post, I've seen a big mistake: good design is always good design, when you talk about putting the things where they should be. Effectiveness is always the first element to focus on, no doubts. What I was pointing your attention on, anyway, is how a certain kind of 'dominant design' is making many websites look 'flat'. I also think that some of this design habits also point in the wrong direction. Just to explain better, I'd say that Drew Wilson is iconic of this. He's quite popular, and you can see some of his work here: http://dribbble.com/drewwilson/ http://dribbble.com/drewwilson/ He uses a mac-like style for web applications, and I think this is a huge mistake. Try to visit http://builditwith.me/ http://builditwith.me/: it's surely beautiful, but do you think it's 'usable'? I think it's not. But the most, I think it has no distinctiveness. Here there's another mistake: distinctiveness does not mean originality. My examples where websites like mint.com or posterous, or even Dropbox. These website can't be called that original, but they surely have a distinctive design, made of key and recognizable colors, way to use (or not) gradients, etc. In my humble opinion, any design must obviously respect some key principles, like effectiveness or usability. But I also think that any design should point on 'identity', especially when building a web app, something most designers don't seem to care about.