I think we all know that this type of article indicting designers for lack of creativity isn't something new. But I certainly can related to the author's senti

I think we all know that this type of article indicting designers for lack of creativity isn't something new. But I certainly can related to the author's sentiment and here's my take on it; the number of good web designers with proper design training only accounts for a small percentage of the people producing web sites. Despite web design being a visual medium, not everybody working in the industry is a visual web designer. There are print designers struggling to make transition, there are developers doing designs out of necessity, and there are people who are learning everything from scratch. And the nature of the Web makes it's easy to lift and 'borrow' things from other people, so you will see a lot of convincingly good designs that are not necessarily produced by designers with design training. Most web work can be copied with basic use of Photoshop, access to stock photos and portfolio sites, and some attention to details. But there is only so much you can do when you don't know how to draw, use and mix colors, lay-out types. This will contribute to sites looking the same. A trained designer has much bigger set of tools and skill-set at his or her disposal. Simply knowing how to draw well, opens up all sorts of creative possibility, but it's a skill that takes a long time to develop. So in a nutshell, I don't think it's that designers have completely given up dreaming. It's just become harder to find great designer's work because the denominator of non-designers has grown so large. There are other contributing factors, such as increasing number of stakeholders now driving designs in the name of semantic design, usability, accessibility, codeability and maintainability, but I'm sure others will touch on those issues.