by Boris Müller, 2018
[https://borism.medium.com/on-the-visual-weariness-of-the-web-8af1c969ce73]
Today’s internet is bland. Everything looks the same: generic fonts, no layouts to speak of, interchangeable pages, and an absence of expressive visual language. Even micro-typography is a mess.
→ even though today’s web technologies have enormous design capabilities
Dribbble versus Behance. Can you spot the difference? Thanks to David Rehman for pointing this out to me. All screenshots: Boris Müller
Technological frameworks like Content Management Systems (CMS) and blogging platforms like WordPress are based on templates. Templates are content agnostic. And that is the problem.
→ design is a connection between form and content; form should both reflect and shape content. Separating them breaks this principle and creates generic content containers. In a design sense, templates are meaningless; the form adds nothing to the content.
economic and pragmatic reasons
→ it’s time-consuming to design individual pages
→ web design is still a matter of technical expertise
Compared to the visual explosion of the graphic design world in the 90s (Irma Boom, David Carson, Paula Scher, Neville Brody), early web pages were still fairly lame.
Early web designers wanted to do graphic design in the browser, but nobody knew how — or what mistakes could be made.
→ There were no expectations of how a web page should look.
→ There were no standards. No CMS (almost), no CSS, no JS, no video, no animation.
We’ve become far too obedient to visual conformity, economic viability, and assumed expectations.
→ Treat the browser as a blank canvas and create expressive, imaginative visual experiences.
→ Use the technological potential of current web technologies as a channel for your creativity.
→ Do not be constrained by questions of usability, legibility, and flexibility.
→ Have an attitude.
→ Disregard Erwartungskonformität.