This article was written in 2013. It might or it might not be outdated. And it could be that the layout breaks. If that’s the case please let me know.
Web design sucks
I often complain about web design. About the fact that the things we create are not good enough. Last Friday I attended a web design meetup at De Ruimte Ontwerpers where I said that I think the current level of web design sucks. The meetup was organised by a few design agencies. They wanted to look into the web designer’s workflow in the responsive design era. This exactly is my problem with the current state of web design: I’ve always considered the web to be responsive. It’s always been weird. You never had control over the way your visitors would view your creation. So I’ve always been disappointed in people who called themselves web designers while they ignored the nature of the web.
Hope
But this meetup gave me hope. There were some excellent talks and people shared some great insights. Finally web designers are exploring the true possibilities and the true restrictions of our medium. What wonderful things can we do with a flexible canvas? How can we provide an optimal user experience to all these different types of input, like mice, fingers and voices? How do we make sure that the things we make today still work on future devices? Everybody present at this meetup was actively looking for answers to these questions, which is a very, very good thing. They were also investigating new workflows, which is a good thing too.
My frustration
So why am I not satisfied with the current level of design? I guess it’s because I’m impatient. These questions should have been answered ten years ago. We knew about the flexible nature of the web back then, we (or better, they) decided to actively ignore it. These are ten years wasted. So yes, web designers are starting to make some excellent stuff for the web. They are starting to create experiences that are truly native to the web. And if you look at it that way, everything is great. But if you think about the years we wasted on trying to tame the fluid nature of the web, you understand my frustration. We now have to wait another ten years before we can finally start creating the stuff that we should have been building today.
If we’ve spent 10 years accepting poor web design, you can’t just blame the designer. If the visual design phase results in boxes with equal height with variable content, and the first point to challenge that design is the conversation with a disappointed customer who’s upset that frontend developers had to make ends meet to fit actual content in the design, then you’ve skipped a few steps of proper intake and review before shipping your product. A designer is part of a process as much as a frontend developer.
@Jasper, you’re right that developers are part of the design process. And this too is something many of us have been saying for years. But you also know that during the waterfall era this was not a shared view by the people who actually did design back then — and it’s still something many designers find hard to get used to.
No wonder. I had my first stint with web design in 2013, and still wonder why the rudiments were still same when I came back nine years later in 2012. Well, looking forward to the next ten years and beyond!