3 ms·

And yet, “performance improvements” are often the excuse for making every single site and web app look the exact same. Dull, flat, ugly, homogeneous design has

And yet, “performance improvements” are often the excuse for making every single site and web app look the exact same. Dull, flat, ugly, homogeneous design has sucked all the life out of the web. Remember flash? Remember when websites were cool? Where it was fun and exciting to go to certain sites simply because of how they were designed? Remember the early days of CSS 3 experimentation? But but but! Skeuomorphism is slow! We need fast sites. We need accessibility! We need to improve our performance! Now look. The web is both ugly AND slow. The big question is why? To me, it’s all about commoditization and making money. Why spend money on expensive artists, designers and engineers to make sites look good If we can band together (big tech) and make flat design the norm? Everyone will forget that the web didn’t used to suck as bad. Instead, we’ll absolutely decimate performance with loads and loads of ads and nonsense JavaScript. We’ll hire product managers to track every single interaction imaginable so user’s experience sucks and we can invade their privacy! Basically big tech ruined the web. They ruined design and everyone pretends like this never happened.

stevenicr 6y ago
I concur with most of the sentiment here- and am happy to push much blame to big google, pointing out that if you are not in google you basically don't exist on the web - (and for many on the planet if you are not in fbook than you are not on the internet) - when google says google web vitals, speed all that ranks you in the top or you are not in the top and you become invisible - it's a thing. However I think the global move away from desktop computing to phones, ipads and cheap chromebooks are the real fun killer for great art and design. I used to love making sites pixel perfect at 1024 - and today if we spend a lot of time making fancy desgins - most people will never see it, since they are checking it out via phone surfing. This is what I point to for people inquiring about design today - basically it's up to the client to provide the design - what pictures and text do you want to put on the small screen? that's your design. Even if you put a note on the small screen telling people to visit our Hd/Desktop version for more cool effects they would enjoy - many (most?) people don't even have a way to access a large screen for computing. Maybe there will be a shift with people casting to TVs and 'smart tvs' browsing better and turn the tide - then we'll need some kind of 'report back framework' to tell us people can see and navigate via the larger view - then we could try to remake flash coolness via html video for the big screen - but then we wouldn't know how close they are to the TV - so how large would navi buttons and pop up text need to be.. meh - back to basic plain stuff. Personally I think we need better zoom-in controls for browsers that people can easily use and understand - this could give us more flexibility as designers, like the hamburger menu - if you can expect people to know how to use it - not holding my breath though.

stevenicr 6y ago

I concur with most of the sentiment here- and am happy to push much blame to big google, pointing out that if you are not in google you basically don't exist on the web - (and for many on the planet if you are not in fbook than you are not on the internet) - when google says google web vitals, speed all that ranks you in the top or you are not in the top and you become invisible - it's a thing. However I think the global move away from desktop computing to phones, ipads and cheap chromebooks are the real fun killer for great art and design. I used to love making sites pixel perfect at 1024 - and today if we spend a lot of time making fancy desgins - most people will never see it, since they are checking it out via phone surfing. This is what I point to for people inquiring about design today - basically it's up to the client to provide the design - what pictures and text do you want to put on the small screen? that's your design. Even if you put a note on the small screen telling people to visit our Hd/Desktop version for more cool effects they would enjoy - many (most?) people don't even have a way to access a large screen for computing. Maybe there will be a shift with people casting to TVs and 'smart tvs' browsing better and turn the tide - then we'll need some kind of 'report back framework' to tell us people can see and navigate via the larger view - then we could try to remake flash coolness via html video for the big screen - but then we wouldn't know how close they are to the TV - so how large would navi buttons and pop up text need to be.. meh - back to basic plain stuff. Personally I think we need better zoom-in controls for browsers that people can easily use and understand - this could give us more flexibility as designers, like the hamburger menu - if you can expect people to know how to use it - not holding my breath though.