
Why have today's designers stopped dreaming? - chestnut-tree
http://www.creativebloq.com/computer-arts/stopped-dreaming-41411268
======
ChrisNorstrom
Design was never about creativity (surprising the user, being unique, being
different), it was about letting the user get things done. Now that this has
been achieved what more do you want? It's like fashion industry people
wondering why everyone's cloths are so boring. Their idea of fashion is art
and expression, the normal person's idea of fashion is usage.

The more "different" and "creative" and "unique" your site's design is, the
more trouble and friction a user encounters trying to learn how it functions.
So every site on the net looking similar might piss off designers but for
users it's a joy.

~~~
sparkie
If design was just about letting the user get things done, can we conclude
that iPad is terribly designed? I can do almost nothing productive on it.

~~~
noir_lord
Getting things done and productivity are not the same.

If the thing I want to get done is watching a movie while I'm on a train then
the iPad works well.

If I want to edit some code then a laptop is better.

~~~
sparkie
Sorry for confusing watching movies with _getting things done_

------
crazygringo
> _Perhaps the essential question we should be asking ourselves each time we
> approach a new site design project is: why would we not choose to be
> different?_

Um, because we've figured out what works for landing pages, in an overall
sense. Being different probably means forgoing conversions, which can
translate into failure.

This isn't to say there isn't still room for improvement, of course. But
improvement is now more incremental, with lots of A/B testing and whatnot. And
for good reason.

If designers still want to be wild and creative, there are still plenty of
places to do it, like personal blogs or personal projects or working on
specific projects that value cutting-edge design because it fits their unique
market.

But for most websites struggling to turn a profit or just gain traction
period, "dreaming" is not a luxury they have. And it's disingenuous of the
author to suggest that this is somehow a failure, no matter how faux-
inspirational it may sound.

~~~
gdubs
Pretty bold claim that the tired design described (in such a funny way) in the
article is some kind of über design and all subsequent designs will be
incremental tweaks on it...

Isn't it a little like saying everything should be written in Java because
it's safe and who can afford to take risks?

Nothing ventured, nothing gained I'd say. Taking a bit of risk on marketing
can help differentiate. Isn't it also a risk to go with what's common,
blending in with the pack?

~~~
derefr
I think the claim is something more like:

• UX is good when it works in tandem with human cognition and psychology.

• HCI science--the study of human cognition and psychology, as it relates to
doing UX--can point us toward designs that are _objectively better_ in their
human usability.

• A design radical-enough to not look or work like current UX--a novel "UX
paradigm"\--would, at this point, necessarily be one that ignores what we
currently know about HCI. It would therefore, probably, be horrible.
(Individual designs from such a novel paradigm could be _surprisingly okay_ ,
if they manage to find some other _local_ maximum in UX-space--but since the
paradigm goes against the grain of human intuition, it wouldn't generate any
_globally_ optimal designs.)

------
bitL
There is just too much of "me too" in design nowadays.

I was really dismayed when MS came up with Metro/Modern and suddenly most
vocal designers flipped switch and started to produce designs inspired by the
new MS's design language. No creativity there at all, just plain boring
simplistic uniformly colored boxes.

I guess even Apple caught the metroitis with iOS 7. No idea what went on over
there, from UI that was appreciated as the most beautiful, polished and envied
it just borrowed approach from the most controversial that many find
disgusting (hey, was the default color palette chosen by color blind people?).

We had the same problem when hiring designers for our creative product - most
designers just flat out copied all sorts of ugly trendy flat designs. I really
don't want my app to look like it was designed by the 5-year old Miró that
just discovered boxes in MS Paint.

What is happening in design? Is it the same thing that happened with classical
music when modernists completely broke historic standards and started to
produce "intellectual" music that maybe 5% of population can appreciate, the
rest just suffers through?

I can automate creation of ugly boxes/flat stuff myself, I don't need
designers to do that. From a designer I would expect something original,
expression of craftmanship that will discern my work from the others. Not
uniformity.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
Microsoft didn't invent flat design or Swiss typography. These are just old
ideas whose time came around...again. Design is not about recreating the wheel
or even invention, but tasteful application of ideas (most non original) to
provide the best experience to the user. Being inventive doesn't guarantee (or
even help) with that.

------
calinet6
The people copying the look and feel of the "startup page" are not designers,
they're generally developers who want a quick site that looks familiar and
gets the job done. More people than ever are creating for the web, but they're
not all designers. The technology has lowered the requirements so much that
almost anyone can create a web site, and that's not a bad thing—more people
should be able to communicate through this medium, and we should embrace that.

But if you look at sites, personal or otherwise, of actual designers, you will
find creativity. Creativity—the act of creative design—is what defines a
person as a designer in the first place.

You could say the same of photographers these days. Anyone seems to be a
photographer; but there are still a scant few who are artists.

"Not everyone can become a great artist; but a great artist _can_ come from
anywhere." Give them a chance. Copying is but the first step.

------
rglover
I've been thinking about this a lot lately and I'm glad Elliot is the one
bringing it up. Back in 2007 when I first got started on the web, I remember
being really excited about seeing new work released from my favorite
designers.

Elliot was hands down one of my favorites for his use of type and textures. I
even recall sitting up late one night (4 or 5 am since he lives in England) to
see his personal site get a revamp.

Nowadays, I pay little attention, seemingly because of things like Dribbble.
This excessive desire to share removes any anticipation from the work and in
essence, makes it less exciting to see. I don't think I'm the only one that
feels this way.

Speaking for my own work, it's just not as fun to spend time crafting a really
cool design when you know that it will be seen and tossed aside in a few days.
I'd argue this is mostly subconscious, but I do find it belittling my work
before it even finds a solid focus.

One thought on this struck me not too long ago while reading The Art of
Worldly Wisdom by Balthasar Gracián:

“Never show half-finished things to others. Let them be enjoyed in their
perfection. All beginnings are formless, and what lingers is the image of that
deformity. The memory of having seen something imperfect spoils our enjoyment
when it is finished. To take in a large object at a single glance keeps us
from appreciating the parts, but it satisfies our taste. Before it is,
everything it is not, and when it begins to be, it is still very close to
nonbeing. It is revolting to watch even the most succulent dish being cooked.
Great teachers are careful not to let their works be seen in embryo. Learn
from nature, and don’t show them until they look good.”

Sharing is great, but I think it's become more of an addiction to feed than a
process for improving the craft at large.

~~~
copperx
It's funny how that quote encourages perfectionism and, if applied to
development, would discourage anyone from creating a minimally viable product
(MVP).

~~~
rglover
It won't be popular, but I'd argue that the MVP school of thought is
responsible for a lot of junk being introduced into the world (when it didn't
need to be). Inevitably, when given a route that _appears_ easy or is
misinterpreted as such, people will cut corners and act as thought they've
"done the work."

I'd say all of this plays into a bigger whole, but that the majority lies in
the favor of junk/homogeneity is no mistake.

------
pzuraq
Design is fashion. It's trends. And personally, I really like the flat trend
(though that's the modernist in me, I also enjoy Le Corbusier and Mies Van Der
Rohe while many look at their designs as stale).

I agree that cookie cutter sites are becoming more common, but that's because
most designers are following the trend. Flat is fresh after years of
skeuomorphic design literally everywhere. It's simple, it's clean, and yes,
there isn't much you can do within those parameters. That doesn't make it bad
design.

Look at any arbitrary modernist building. 90% of the time, it's terrible:
boring, simple shapes; uninspired color choices; too much concrete. At the
time it was a breath of fresh air. Moreover, when it's done _right_ , it's
beautiful forever:

[http://www.fallingwater.org/img/home_assets/new_first.jpg](http://www.fallingwater.org/img/home_assets/new_first.jpg)

[http://www.theconservationcenter.com/Farnsworth%20House.jpg](http://www.theconservationcenter.com/Farnsworth%20House.jpg)

[http://3.bp.blogspot.com/\--ru1VYyd8Dw/TrdHRcLZrrI/AAAAAAAAAa...](http://3.bp.blogspot.com/--ru1VYyd8Dw/TrdHRcLZrrI/AAAAAAAAAaM/WAgu4AGg-
Us/s1600/Villa+Savoye.jpg)

------
pcurve
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.

------
lnanek2
I'd kind of prefer it if they stopped dreaming and started working seriously.
I've converted a couple Android apps to Google's new design style with
unlabeled action bar icons in the top and other flat design concepts and they
all just fell flat with users. Users could find a big, glossy, 3D button at
the bottom of the app great. Make it a single color icon without a label and
hardly any of them find it, or even try it. Designers really need to stop
dreaming and start being a little more practical. Sure Google's and flat
design look nice. But they don't work well. It's just silly designer dreaming
without real usage data supporting it.

~~~
en4bz
The same thing happened with the removal of the menu button on Android. They
moved one of the most used buttons from the most convenient spot, right beside
my thumb, to the top of the screen. On top of that screens these days are
almost all over 4.5 inches, much larger than the average thumb. Same thing
goes for applications with drawers. The drawer icon is a far as possible from
my thumb making it the least practical design imaginable. I find apps with the
split action bar to often be the most practical and convenient even though
they don't look as good.

~~~
fredgrott
has to do with screen size and orientation...

because android has more screen size variations the most common orientation is
landscape and thus reason for moving the menu button location

------
neilsharma
Can you provide some examples of creative, non-cookie-cutter websites that you
think work well? I agree with your general sentiment, but examples of
alternative designs would be a little more actionable and inspirational imo.

------
Zigurd
It's a good question, but an impoverished blog post. There are no Big Ideas
since the Desktop Metaphor was discredited. That's not to say design has
fallen asleep. You can of course get highly trained highly competent and
highly experienced design inputs to a product. But, it's more about filtering
what works from what doesn't. Who is reaching for a new paradigm?

Maybe Facebook's buy of Occulus Rift will ignite an arms race in 3D design
that leads to something really new, if the daunting literalism of 3D can be
overcome.

------
Silhouette
_Perhaps the essential question we should be asking ourselves each time we
approach a new site design project is: why would we not choose to be
different?_

Isn't this an obvious, if unfortunate, commercial reality? The fact is that
cheap, mass-produced products have a large market that is willing to pay for
them.

If you can make such products with less time and money than you would need to
create original, thoughtful, customised work for every job, then you have a
viable business model. Moreover, your business model can be implemented by
people who don't have the skill and creativity required to do bespoke work.

Fortunately, there will always be a market for premium sites, with original
designs that are carefully planned with the site's goals in mind, and with a
look and feel that are matched to the client's brand. There will always be
clients who need a completely custom web app to fit their particular needs.
And these kinds of client will always be willing to pay a premium for good
work.

For better or worse, there are simply a lot more clients who don't have that
kind of budget, and for whom a site that is built from a decent template with
a basic CMS in half a day does the job well enough. And there are even more
who don't want a template that is exactly like everyone else, but can settle
for the work of a newbie web developer who doesn't know much but can manage to
fire up Yeoman and throw together some HTML5 Boilerplate and Bootstrap and a
couple of jQuery plug-ins.

------
raverbashing
Creating is hard, copying is easier

And once created, and people get accustomed to that language, it makes it
easier for them to use (everybody knows what an x in the corner of a window
does)

------
Kluny
Some people are extraordinary and blaze trails. The rest of us do our best
with existing tools that are known to work. What's the problem? It's the same
as it ever was. If you think you can come up with a better design, go nuts. If
no one else adopts it, it's probably not quite as good as you think it is.

------
zw123456
A while back someone said to me "you don't work for a company, you work for
the Valley". The meaning that the valley has become an entity unto itself. If
that proposition is true, then the valley has become something equivalent to a
large organization, like a big company, but much more of a loose
confederation. But like other large organizations, it can be come lethargic
and stuck in their ways. Only people who are connected the right way get
opportunities and there is a set bureaucracy and so on. There has been an
argument going on whether a large organization can be innovative. Another
interesting question is whether a loosely confederated organization like the
valley can loose it's innovativeness for the same types of reasons large
organizations have trouble being innovative?

------
geargrinder
A lot of similarity of websites has to do with usability. If I go to a website
that is similar to others I frequent, it is easier to figure out what to do.
This is proven out in user testing. Those sites that are familiar will do
better in converting and win those A/B tests.

How many times have you been to a site with a different design and have to
spend a few minutes trying to figure out the navigation? If you are trying to
get your users to do something, familiarity is what wins.

Maybe our common definition of creativity is wrong. Good design isn't always
"new and cool." Often the best design simply achieves a goal within given
parameters.

------
fidotron
This is very similar to the argument made here:
[http://montrealrampage.com/king-ludd-10-the-tedious-
tyranny-...](http://montrealrampage.com/king-ludd-10-the-tedious-tyranny-of-
flatland/)

Unsurprisingly, I agree with the conclusion, that services which happen to be
delivered over networks actually have little place doing much branding at all,
and users should be in a position to take more control of the look and feel.
CSS etc. simply isn't enough, and simultaneously isn't accessible enough to
normal people.

As it stands the incentives for design innovation are getting wiped out by a
need to not offend anyone.

------
noclip
It's definitely a bit surreal that even a crypto library vulnerability not
only has its own web site but that the site is almost indistinguishable, like
every other site launched today, from an Apple product announcement page.

~~~
potatolicious
Why does it need to be distinguishable? It's a purely informational site whose
intent is to educate its users.

If anything this is exactly the sort of site that should follow an expected
format, so that users spend more time digesting the information presented
instead of learning where everything is.

It's like a restaurant menu - there is some variation between every one, but
ultimately they conform to an expected format, _and that 's a good thing_.

There's being different in order to improve upon something, and there's being
different for the sake of being different.

------
dredmorbius
Oddly, on mobile this site robs 33% of my screen with persistent header and
footer elements.

See: this is a web page.

[http://justinjackson.ca/words.html](http://justinjackson.ca/words.html)

------
sparkie
No time for dreaming, busy patching for IE.

------
radley
Cars, clothes, homes, and furniture all found a standardization. We barely had
computer UIs 20 years, so UI design was of an indeterminate form. Now we know
the basics form and rules, thus design is now in the details.

------
seanmcdirmid
I'm a researcher married to a designer. My wife has many more creativity
constraints in her job then I do in mine, but she builds usable products for
today while I get to think 5-10 years out.

------
vayarajesh
very true, specially in the field of web-design. If you browse the latest 10
pages of themeforest.net templates you will find all similar designs (infact
exactly what you mentioned in your article in a detail manner :) )

Since the comeback of flat design everybody is becoming a designer because all
they need to do is put big pictures and 1 or 2 colors and bordered boxes and
vola! you are a designer

~~~
jedrek
Looking for cutting edge design on themeforest is like looking for culinary
innovation at a 7-11.

------
aaron987
I couldn't agree more. For a "creative" profession, there is a startling lack
of creativity among designers. I'll admit that I am not a designer by any
means, so maybe I just don't fully understand the challenges and issues that
designers have to deal with. However, I do get annoyed when I show up on a
site and it looks and behaves just like every other site, with the same fonts,
same colors, and text that doesn't tell you anything about the product. It
really does get old.

~~~
dasil003
The difference between art and design is that design serves a concrete
purpose. Obviously there is creativity involved in designed, but the
creativity of a good designer is about solving problems. This manifests in
different ways, but for interactive or industrial design _usability_ is the
most important concern, and therefore, all else being equal, uniformity across
sites is a good thing. Forms of visual design whose primary concerns are
either/or attention-grabbing (eg. billboards, posters) or communication (eg.
magazine, flyers) naturally enjoy a bit more creative leeway.

With established norms stabilizing on the web, UI creativity there can and
should decrease. However that said, there is always the possibility for
optimizing towards narrower and more specific problems, but this must be done
sparingly since new interactive paradigms introduct a cognitive load on the
user which may not be acceptable for the intended audience.

~~~
aaron987
Well in terms of layout and functionality, sure, I understand the need for
consistency. My comment was referring to the artistic element of color schemes
and fonts. That is the part that gets annoying when everybody does it the
same. You can have consistency of function while being creative with colors
and things like that. I love it when I show up on a site with bold colors and
unique design ideas. It gives me the impression that the company is willing to
try new things.

~~~
dasil003
Maybe you're just annoyed everyone is using Twitter Bootstrap?

~~~
Silhouette
It's not just Bootstrap, though, is it? It's also flat design, similar colour
palettes, similar fonts, using one big hero image or some sort of carousel,
and numerous other details.

And the real kicker is that _most of these aren 't done well_.

Aside from having a very limited expressive range, flat design has all kinds
of usability problems that plenty of people have called out from the start.
The fact that both Microsoft and Apple have chosen to adopt flat design does
not change that unfortunate reality.

I cringe a little every time I see a web site using Proxima Nova, a font which
renders _horribly_ at many sizes and in many browsers, whatever all the
renting-you-fonts-for-money services will tell you about how optimised their
fonts are. I wince even more when I have to use a site with trendy thin fonts
that are so hard to read under many conditions that I have to start hacking
the CSS around to make it more comfortable. At least there is a small silver
lining here: Helvetica is less common in font stacks now, so everyone on
Windows who has printer fonts installed can breathe a sigh of relief.

Carousels have problems that are well known to anyone who studies usability,
yet people persist in using them, presumably because they care more about
looking cool in a demo than having a site that is actually effective. Or they
just don't know any better, because they don't know anything about usability,
and anyway they feel compelled to use at least 98% of what's in their template
on every project. After all, the only acceptable alternative is to use a hero
image that automatically scales to full page width, thus reducing modern, good
quality, high resolution monitors to displaying heavily pixellated versions of
clip art that is probably irrelevant anyway, and obviously no designer would
do something silly like that.

It's not the consolidation and uniformity that bothers me. It's consistently
doing things that just _aren 't very good_ that I find frustrating.

------
robotys
Nope, but they only keep their dream in the head. Client want other useful
design (not dream) right now.

------
jinushaun
Because dreaming gives us infinite scrolling bullshit "ux"

------
PuzzleHouse
no suitable resources for implementation.

