
Why do all websites look the same? - guzik
https://medium.com/s/story/on-the-visual-weariness-of-the-web-8af1c969ce73
======
actionscripted
Also:

1) Why are all buildings the same? Light switches are often in similar places
and the space between the floor and ceiling is pretty standard.

2) Why are all vehicles the same? Mirrors are always in the same spots and
seat belts all work the same.

3) Why are all laptops the same? Keyboard center on the bottom with a trackpad
or nub near the center. Screen on top, ports and stuff on the sides.

There are components that are common in all facets of our lives that when
different can cause problems or surprise which could be good or bad. We need
to join two floors of a building. Use stairs! People understand stairs. We
need to showcase a collection of clickable images. Use a grid! People
understand link grids.

If you want to make your website usable you have to lean on expectations and
those are pretty well defined nowadays. Imagine walking into a room and
turning on the lights using a switch in the middle of the floor or plugging in
your laptop's power cord at the top/back of the screen.

Most companies spending money on a website want them to feel fresh and
creative and engaging but they also have to temper that with usability and
expectations. That's why all websites "look the same" or at least why the
author thinks they do.

Just because certain elements are in the same spot(s) or behave similarly
doesn't mean things are the same. Or, at least, to me they aren't.

~~~
omg_ketchup
I'm actually gonna have to go ahead and blame the demise of Flash for the
current lack of interesting web design. I know there were technical reasons to
get rid of it. Security. Mobile. Proprietary. etc. Whatever.

Some flash sites were horrible. But there were some real gems. That Hacker
News design by Tyrion's brother is probably inspired by a bunch of old Flash
sites that followed that template.

Flash was _so easy_ to work with. Draw some neat stuff with their tools,
animate it in the same program with their timeline, then make it all navigable
and smart, still in the same program. You test it, in that same program. Then
you publish it, and it works exactly how you made it work, in every browser,
ever. One file. So easy for artists, designers, and non-technical people.

That's why we don't see cool shit on the web anymore- it's too hard/boring to
make.

~~~
rantanplan
Out of 100 sites in flash, maybe 2 were the gems you describe. The remaining
98 were utter crap that should die in a fire.

The people who designed these gems would probably be able to design good sites
no matter what tools they had at their disposal.

~~~
rch
Except in that the people paying the designers would demand sites like the 98
horrible ones.

------
mcv
I think the redesigns in that article demonstrate why most websites look the
same.

Let's do a test. Go to a bookshop and buy a novel. Now go to a different
bookshop, and buy a different novel from a different writer and a different
publisher. Read them. Chances are they're going to look very similar.
Different cover maybe, but inside, mostly black letters in an unobtrusive font
on a white page with sensible margins. No decorations or illustrations,
nothing at weird angles or sizes. They all use the form that's efficient at
transferring the content, the story, to your head.

Some web sites are about their design, but most are about the content they
present, and they want to present that content in an efficient manner. A
design that distracts from the content is not practical.

~~~
blue4
A website shouldn't be a book.

~~~
krapp
A website whose purpose is to convey textual information and to be readable
should _resemble_ a book, or more likely, a magazine, because it has a similar
function to the printed page.

~~~
exodust
"Convey textual information" is not the sole purpose of any website.

Websites have many purposes and functions, including of course interactive
functions and connections with other elements both within the site and from
other places.

Completely different to any book.

~~~
krapp
> "Convey textual information" is not the sole purpose of any website.

It doesn't have to be the sole purpose of any website for it to be the primary
purpose of many.

For instance the purpose of this forum, along with many forums, is to convey
primarily textual information in the form of comments arranged in a hierarchy.

The purpose of medium.com is to convey textual information in the form of blog
posts.

The purpose of a site like Wired, newspaper sites and magazine sites, like
their analog counterparts, is to convey textual information (albeit with a
heavy graphical element) in the form of articles.

Websites expand upon the possibilities inherent to the medium of the printed
page but HTML is a _hypertext_ format, and its purpose (and therefore the
purpose of most webpages) is to convey information in the form of _hyper_
text. Interactivity and embedded elements don't detract from the textual
nature of the web or its origin in concept or the relationship in the styles
evolved with the printed page.

>Completely different to any book.

Different in structure, but not different in purpose, and therefore not
completely divorced from the same design considerations.

Yes, we could design every website to look the way the redesigns in the
article do, but would you really rather use the hacker news redesign presented
in the article than this one? Would you rather use _any_ of those redesigns?

------
deanCommie
Websites are not art*

They are communication mediums. Either delivering communication effectively to
the user, or to let the user communicate effectively with others, or do so bi-
directionally.

Or they're tools to get work done - maybe even make other art.

In all cases _functionality_ is most important - which is not incompatible
with aesthetics. Aesthetics and usability are vital too.

But it does constrain somewhat the variety of your medium. And that's okay.

As LitFan said - it's the same reason cars and smartphones tend to look the
same as well.

* Except when they are, and when they are they should be appreciated as such and graded as such, and there are such websites, but they are by far the exception.

~~~
ardy42
> As LitFan said - it's the same reason cars and smartphones tend to look the
> same as well.

I agree, but for a different reason: they're all following the same design
_fads_ and/or using the same frameworks, which make certain designs "easier"
than others. The content of the fads or the defaults aren't necessarily the
most effective or functional for the particular use-case.

------
Fnoord
They don't look the same; you can make an argument they look similar though.

"Fabian and Florian turned Hacker News into an interactive visualization. The
social media site is a news aggregator, focusing on computer science and
information technology. Its design is bare-bones but it has complex
functionality for voting and discussions. Fabian and Florian have taken the
existing structure and turned it into a typographic space of timelines and
networks. The visual presentation is based on the sequence and connections of
news and comments. They also connected their design to the API of Hacker News,
so you can actually use it to read the site. View the redesign of Hacker
News."

And the redesign is a usability nightmare. You cannot easily skip a topic
you're not interested in, and you cannot even skip the comments easily which
are emphasized. In normal HN, you can browse news.ycombinator.com and click on
the links from there. You can open the original links and the HN discussions
in tabs. Not in this redesign. Perhaps it is God's greatest gift on mobile (I
tried it on desktop), I don't know. Examples of doing it different should be
objectively _better_ ; this one doesn't appear to be such an example, so don't
mention it [1]. Instead, go back to the drawing board.

[1] There's also a bug that clicking on No. and Pts. gets you to that user's
hompeage. Which could be 1 or 76, but it has nothing to do with that userID.

~~~
lasagnaphil
I’ve tried it on mobile. (iPhone 8) The whole thing takes more than five
seconds to load, and the UI is basically unusuable. Tried clicking at an
article, comment text is almost impossible to read due to the broken layout.

------
iambateman
Turns out, 95% of the Internet is used for practical purposes, and certain
best practices arise...a balance between the content and the ads.

The other 5% is a self-expressive art project.

Part of me wonders if the author is trolling everyone by writing an article
about the need for more unique design on Medium.com.

~~~
croisillon
reminds me of
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18145995](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18145995)

------
LitFan
All websites looking "the same" is effectively evolution at work. Many website
designs and layouts have been tried, and the "best" of them have stuck around.

This can be seen in any product (cars, smartphones, food - the list goes on).

From time to time there are designs that don't look like others, and those may
or may not be met with approval. If they're liked, those designs (or aspects
of them) get blended with the standard.

~~~
amelius
I don't think this is true. I think designs get copied from websites which are
successful (in all ways, not just design), because people have positive
feelings with those designs, and also because using them requires a learning
effort. It doesn't mean, however, that the designs themselves are best.

~~~
PeterisP
For a casual user, a design that requires extra learning effort to use it is
objectively worse than a familiar design.

So for a generic website which cares about first-time visitors (as opposed to
a specialized tool that people use often) following established standards and
familiar UX paradigms _is_ good usability design.

------
r00dY
I run a front-end agency that specializes in helping top-league branding
agencies and designers code their websites.

Designers try to make sth fresh and out of the box all the time. The problem
with these solutions are:

1\. UX sucks

2\. Don't scale to other resolutions (especially mobile / tablet).

3\. EXTREMELY expensive to code comparing to "boring" web solutions
(multipliers might be as big as 5-10x)

So most of the work we do is to try to make designers think with patterns
("boring" but the only way to fit in budget) and try to get as much as they
can from STATIC design. Play with typography, key visuals, content etc. This
is where their work brings most value for reasonable money.

The author of the article is a professor, so wouldn't expect realistic
business thinking from him. He might be sad because web is boring, but usually
no one wants to spend huge amount of money for prototypes where there's 95%
probability that UX and stability will be worse than standard.

And there's a HUGE value in familiarity for users. That's why most of
"creative projects" end up looking pretty similar at the end. I've seen many
e-commerce sites which had "fancy design" and after months/years ended up with
standard e-comm layout.

Also, web today is super hard comparing to 10 years ago. Number of things to
think about multiplied by A LOT. Coding great static website with all things
stable and looking great is a big task already.

It's like asking for a car with steering wheel in the back or with 3 wheels
and paying for it 5x more. Do you want one?

EDIT:

Not saying "creative projects" are bad or sth, they sometimes are super coool.
But I treat them more like "web art installation". Nice if you like them but
not really practical.

------
sxp62000
None of the examples the author shared are usable. They're different just for
the sake of being different. This sort of stuff only works for marketing
campaigns that have a short shelf-life or maybe art museums.

I'm surprised a bunch of people who call themselves interaction designers put
little thought into how people would actually interact with these "web-art"
masterpieces.

------
efitz
Why is there layout on the web at all?

In almost every case, I care about the content, not the particular web site
designer’s vision of the “experience”. I don’t want an experience, I want
information. I would prefer the content be delivered to my browser with
metadata describing what it is, e.g. “news article” or “comment” or “image of
purchasable item”, and choose my own experience- that is best for me.

Browsers seem like a silly vanity for me- 90% of the functionality is about
allowing a remote party to control my experience. I’d rather control my own.

~~~
krapp
> Why is there layout on the web at all?

For the same reason text in a book is arranged in paragraphs, and why
magazines separate articles into headers, body text, insets, etc, rather than
having all printed media be simply unformatted text.

Having navigational elements and content groups on a site (a "layout") with a
predictable visual style allows users to more easily differentiate between the
different parts of a site, their different functions, and to navigate those
sections more easily. Typographic elements like headers, paragraphs, font
styling (bold, underline, etc.) make text easier to read and communicate
concepts like hierarchy and emphasis. Flow is a necessary consideration when
incorporating non-textual elements such as images into a document alongside
text. Modern sites must also consider how they will appear on multiple screen
sizes down to mobile.

>Browsers seem like a silly vanity for me- 90% of the functionality is about
allowing a remote party to control my experience. I’d rather control my own.

A remote party isn't controlling your experience, they're sending you
documents in a markup language, and your browser is interpreting that markup.
If you want to download and view raw HTML then you can wget the pages and open
them in the text editor of your choice (I think RMS does something like that
to avoid executing nonfree code), but you should realize that most people
don't want to view raw metadata and have to write their own stylesheet and
schema for each site, they just want to read the document.

~~~
efitz
I want to decouple layout from content, and control layout myself locally.
There is too much active content and too much commingling of style directives
and content in most modern web sites. I want the markup to be higher level and
focus on describing the content rather than specifying style.

------
tvanantwerp
"Users spend most of their time on other sites. This means that users prefer
your site to work the same way as all the other sites they already know."

[https://lawsofux.com/jakobs-law.html](https://lawsofux.com/jakobs-law.html)

~~~
mcv
By that logic, all websites should look like Facebook.

~~~
ntumlin
I'm not sure that's wrong. Look at the (temporary) outrage whenever Facebook
does a redesign, even Facebook is allowed to not look like Facebook.

~~~
stepvhen
FWIW, from what i remember facebook's redesigns were never just a visual
thing. they always added and pushed some functionality, made some things much
harder to find, or quietly removed things entirely.

A similar thing happened when Last.fm did their huge redesign. The new website
was all js now, and they quit all support on the forums, messaging, pretty
much all the old ways of communication between users. And for me, that was
awful, since i was a part of a music collective that communicated primarily on
those forums. After that everybody dispersed.

So outrage at a redesign is not always unfounded or silly. Web companies tend
to hide things in them.

~~~
Izkata
> they always added and pushed some functionality

Most of the outrage I remember was around hiding and removing functionality:
Chronological newsfeed, page customizations, network pages, etc

------
jsgo
Looking at this and then the 4 examples they give, wow, I appreciate Bootstrap
more (saying Bootstrap as it tends to be blamed for conformity of websites
now).

The reason why Bootstrap is nice relative to what they give as examples is
that while (usually) it looks pretty, the content is what you focus on and not
the dissonance that the UI creates. In the case of the art ones, it makes
sense as I imagine that was the intent, to flip the focus, so as an art
exhibition, that's perfectly fine and good. But as a website, I wouldn't use
it.

It reminds me of early days (around 1995. I remember buying No Doubt's Tragic
Kingdom CD around this time and their band's URL wasn't a custom domain but
something hosted by one of their labels, I believe. Different times). A lot of
bands, with Nine Inch Nails being a bigger one, would go for these UI
nightmare sites with, my guess, the intent that they're essentially a game of
sorts seeking out hidden stuff. Those types of things turned me off (still
liked the music though, just not the sites), but I know there are those who
loved them so more power to them.

------
guzik
Here's the concept of HN: [https://interface.fh-potsdam.de/future-
retro/HN/](https://interface.fh-potsdam.de/future-retro/HN/) if someone missed
it

~~~
Traubenfuchs
This is completely unusable -is it supposed to be a parody?

~~~
laurent123456
I see this more as an example of what can be done. It's a bit like concept
cars - they aren't supposed to be driven so designers take the opporuntiy to
push the limits of what can be done. Perhaps that website, once the usability
is improved, could be the beginning of a good idea, or perhaps it should be
dropped altogether but it doesn't hurt to try new things.

------
hartator
"Why do all websites look the same?" and it's a Medium post.

More seriously, I think the Internet has the reverse issue. Every website
looks and is used differently. You don't have to figure out how to turn pages
when reading a new book.

------
esotericn
They don't.

Trivial example: Hacker News looks nothing like Medium. All blogs on Medium
look the same though.

The mainstream web looks the same because it's all gone through the same
funnel.

The web is split. You have the oldschool developer part (mostly textmode with
the odd showoff project), and the mainstream part (full of GDPR banners,
advertisements, cookies, tracking stuff, 10MB page loads, etc).

~~~
paulie_a
The GDPR pop-ups are incredibly annoying. The particular website has no
obligation to comply with it. Most websites don't need to even give it a
thought. It seems to just be a knee jerk reaction yet it is irrelevant.

~~~
paulie_a
I normally don't complain about downvotes, because honestly who cares. But I
am curious why I do get consistently downvoted for simply stating that the
GDPR is not relevant for a significant portion of the internet. EU users might
not like it. But it's true. Most websites do not need a banner. They can
absolutely flaunt compliance without worries.

------
happertiger
Man, all of those models look like flash websites. That’s the problem. The
unconstrained mess of deconstructed html, the Skeuomorph movement and
reconstruction of architecture in the browser, the relationship diagram...
these are the same explorations of early flash and dhtml websites.

It’s challenging to rebel against the dominant paradigm because everyone ends
up with tattoos and blue hair and alternative becomes mainstream all over
again.

------
msla
I'd say these re-designs are inaccessible but people would get the wrong idea;
inaccessible usually means not accessible to people who have handicaps of some
variety, and that doesn't accurately capture the problems with these re-
designed websites: They're not accessible to _anyone_ , _anywhere_ ,
_regardless_ of how able they are, unless they're the designer themself.

They not only blindly assume you have the latest web browser technology and
are willing to use it, heedless of security concerns and basic propriety, on
relatively minor sites, they assume you've crawled up inside the designer's
head and therefore see the site the way the designer sees it.

Which brings me to why sites "All Look The Same" (kind of a stupid thing to
say, but I'll not fight it): It's a design language, something where designers
and users can agree which elements do what, what affordances they have, and,
therefore, how to _use_ the site to get what they want from it.

 _None_ of the re-designs follow that.

 _None_ of the re-designs are respectful of anyone else.

These re-designs are a bad parody of design work, and make designers look bad
by association.

------
mikekij
I was with the author, until I saw the HN redesign. Looked beautiful, but not
functional. Made me realize why HN / reddit / quora / etc use the format they
do: it works.

------
chuckgreenman
> David Carson once said, “don’t confuse communication with legibility.” We
> should apply this advice to the current state of web design.

Granted I didn't go to design school, but efficiency and the ability to be
understood are pretty high on my list.

Take example 2, not only does it scroll jack for a square pattern, there are
things that highlight but aren't clickable, there's a gif that's chewing up
CPU cycles, and this seemingly functionless page requires 58 requests, 48MB
and somehow 1.2 minutes to load according to chrome dev tools, compare to
loading the HN homepage in 1.1 seconds.

I'm not an advocate for turning the internet into a server of pure text files,
but when art and usability are head to head, usability must win every time or
your users will go somewhere else.

~~~
SippinLean
Carson was saying that as a rejection of minimalism. It was an embrace of
experimental graphic design. He was specifically saying that "efficiency and
the ability to be understood" were not always the most important factors in a
design.

------
laythea
Please don't encourage these kind of interfaces to websites. A website is not
a piece of art. It's a thing I interface with! Your fellow users and I, thank
you.

~~~
rchaud
At no point did the author argue that your local bank's website should
resemble one of the examples. It is an article about unconventional designs on
the web, of course he is going to show the most out-there examples from his
students.

Personally I loved the cyberpunk feel of the Hacker News prototype, even
though it's a usability nightmare. I like to view this stuff to engage my
imagination and think about what's possible, not whether this design is ready
to scale to millions of users.

------
jackconnor
The attempt at redesigning the web ends in unreadable nonsense, so I think
that answers the question of "why" with "readability"?

------
woodpanel
> _Why do all websites look the same?_

This question puts two things in the spotlight:

1) the all too common software developer's ignorance for the art of design

2) the all too common designer's ignorance for the art of frontend software
(which is usually data retrieval and entry, using common and learned UX
functionality)

There often is a lack of humbleness regarding putting what I (designer) fancy
behind what users need.

OTOH devs admire things like material design today or bootstrap in the old
days as a way to "solve" design. Yet, those frameworks only touch half of what
design is needed for (common UX patterns, don't come across as unprofessional)
and fail at the other. I.e. there is no uniqueness, subliminal mood, branding,
emotion or even recognizability in most pages/apps that use those frameworks.

The idea of letting A/B tests guide your design decisions gave us the many
ugly things Google did in the past. And while they certainly improved on
design, material design breathes the same spirit. The spirit of design as
something "to solve".

Luckily with material design's CDK this spirit seems to be solved too :-)

------
codingdave
Why shouldn't they look the same? They are tools. Usually for communication,
and you usually want your visitors to intuitively know how to navigate your
content. By all means, feel free to break conventions if you have a purpose in
doing so, but for most brochure sites or information-based sites, you have no
reason for such things.

Quite the contrary, when I set up a site for someone, I tell them to make it
match their brand, but not to get overly creative other aspects of the design.
A creative design may be interesting, but is that the goal of the site? To
convince the audience that you found an interesting designer? Or do you want
to communicate something about your product/project?

Simple, effective designs have evolved over the last couple decades. Designers
should experiment, as that is their purpose, and it is how we avoid
stagnation. Everyone else should use what works.

------
malvosenior
There's some irony to having this posted on Medium which is about the most
generic looking site on the internet.

~~~
mcv
My thought exactly, even when I clicked on the link.

I think publishing this in Medium rather than on one of those designs of their
students, kinda proves why most websites prefer to look boring.

------
aicioara
As a hacker with no design background, reading Design for Hackers [1] was life
changing. I finally understood that design is just a set of rules and that
really modelled well on my engineering mindset.

Add to that frameworks such as Bootstrap CSS and opinionated website builders
such as Weebly and I finally overcame a major limitation in my skillset. I
could now actually build what I wanted to build, knowing that it looks decent
and I can focus on what is under the hood.

If the web all looks the same, it is probably because it is built by people
like me who need a rigid framework to work within.

[1] [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Design-Hackers-Reverse-
Engineering-...](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Design-Hackers-Reverse-Engineering-
Beauty/dp/1119998956)

------
Hoasi
Interesting article and there is some truth to it. Although to be fair, the
counter-examples provided, while interesting and nice, are almost all
unpractical, illegible or hard to navigate. A lot of work went there, sure,
but the results kind of weaken his otherwise good points.

------
natecavanaugh
No, just no. I understand that to push the current state further, you need to
think outside of the box, but what you call bland, I call essential to
communication.

I find the David Carson quote (confusing communication with legibility) to be
ridiculous on it's face. If your intention is to communicate information, it
_needs_ to be legible, clear, and understandable. If your goal is to make
beautiful designs, fine, but understand and state your goal.

Not a single website redesign here would ever work, and would be offensive as
a user trying to consume information.

Design is about embracing constraints for the medium to solve a goal. This is
about removing any constraint to make a pretty picture. Great, looks nice, but
I won't ever use it. So what was the real goal?

------
lostgame
The answer to this as of the last 5-10 years seems to be to simply be
'responsive design'.

Since we need to lay out a web page in several different ways as-is, it seems
as though evolution has taken care of what seems to be a very 'natural' design
pattern at this point.

------
chippy
I think it's because web design used to be a branch of graphic design, and now
it's not - it's now a branch of web development.

Designs for websites were made in photoshop by creatives. Now designs for
websites are made by front end engineers, or UX consultants.

~~~
mrhappyunhappy
Exactly. Making an artistic and unique website is simply too expensive. Think
of all the lost revenue. Web design has become a science of analytics
crunching, conversion optimization and retention. The author seems to show
total ignorance for human pattern recognition.

------
sizzle
"We have the capability to implement almost every conceivable idea and layout.
We can create radical, surprising, and evocative websites. We can combine
experimental typography with generative images and interactive experiences.”

Depends on the type of website, for example, if it’s a banking or airline
ticketing website, my tolerance for creativity for the sake of differentiation
is non-existent. I am not passively consuming media, I came to the site to
complete a task and want to get it done with the least friction and
advertising shoved in my face as possible.

Similarly, this is why I’ll never stop using ad-blockers and keep mentally
noting which sites employ scummy UX dark patterns so I can spread awareness of
alternatives to friends and family-- cause I consider 'dark patterns' both
psychological opportunistic and predatory.

People use technology as a means to an end, whether to check their savings
account balance, chat with friends, or look up information, introducing
friction in the form of 'avant-garde' creativity without UX research/data on
the impact to usability, is a recipe for disaster on user engagement metrics
and revenue stream intimately tracked by upper management to justify
continuing to pay the salaries of designers, developers, product/project
managers/BSAs, etc. and to keep the lights on at a majority of tech companies
(in my experience). Thoughts?

------
haburka
Ironically, this is a medium post. Why didn’t the author make their own
website to demonstrate how creative they can be?

The real answer why sites are homogenous is because everything has to be
mobile friendly. There are only a few options that work, unless you’re going
to completely redo your layout and css for mobile. The truth is, modern front
end is hard, so that’s not a good option. Ui designers also save a ton of work
by keeping the mobile design similar to the desktop one.

------
atoav
Because Designers don't know how to build them without using frameworks.
Because Customers don't know what they need, but very much what they want.

~~~
krapp
Most frameworks are built around readability and a few standard layout
configurations based on the principles of magazine page design and typography.

What do customers need that modern web frameworks don't provide, and why is it
wrong for customers to want the web to be familiar and unobtrusive?

------
Kagerjay
I still think there's a lot of subtle UX innovation going around. You just
need to know where to look. Some more well known sites include:

\- Medium

\- Atlas Obscura

\- Techcrunch

\- New York Times (visual / interactive story articles)

\- [https://baymard.com/research](https://baymard.com/research) \- ecommerce
UX research

Not all UX design content mediums have been invented yet, there's billions of
permutations, and different content requirements. Different color, typography,
color psychology, shadows, icons, animations, etc all change the way a story
is told. A website is just a content medium, much like a video or image.

However, at the end of the day, content will mostly be the same. It's just CSS
and JS changing the look and feel of the site. Example, one static HTML file
and multiple CSS implementations:
[http://csszengarden.com](http://csszengarden.com).

To the untrained eye, every site does look the same. My definition of good UX
is this - _minimize the total distance your eyes have to adjust, and maximize
the amount of content captured_. Without being overly fatiguing (usage of
whitespace, eye relief, etc).

------
8bitsrule
Because rectilinear layout is well-supported ... but completely non-intuitive
and artless. Options to do otherwise are painful and time-consuming and
immediately run into browser incompatibilities.

Just try laying out a series of iconic buttons in a swooping curve. Or try
laying out some text inside a circle ... or just making a circle, a triangle,
a leaf-shape... or fitting an image between two columns of text ...

The tools to do all of this were available 25 years ago in desktop-publishing
apps. Creating a beautiful page took design skills, but the layout was not
done with CSS but by drawing on the page and making adjustments with handles.

Not by endless hours of fussing with CSS version xyz and grids and flexes and
compromises by sacrificing original intent.

HTML layout is absurdly painful. Most people with deadlines don't have time to
spend hours to make it work in one browser, switching to another browser and
SCREAMING, and tossing it all out and returning to rectilinear boxes.

That's why.

------
V-2
These stylistic experiments on breaking away from the 'by the numbers'
routines immediately reminded me of Vonnegut's "pity the readers" advice,
acknowledging the inevitable limitations of artistic liberty of a writer.

 _7\. Pity the readers_

 _They have to identify thousands of little marks on paper, and make sense of
them immediately. They have to read, an art so difficult that most people don
't really master it even after having studied it all through grade school and
high school --- twelve long years._

 _So this discussion must finally acknowledge that our stylistic options as
writers are neither numerous nor glamorous, since our readers are bound to be
such imperfect artists. Our audience requires us to be sympathetic and patient
readers, ever willing to simplify and clarify --- whereas we would rather soar
high above the crowd, singing like nightingales._

Pity your average web surfer.

------
JeffreyKaine
This is a case where an Artist has confused themselves with a designer.
Designers solve problems, often by using existing conventions to help an
interface/tool/object/room be instantly usable and understandable.

An artist flexes their creativity and communicates thoughts through
imagery/experience/sound.

------
otras
I also recommend the author's follow up article " _Balancing Creativity and
Usability_ " [0].

[0]: [https://medium.com/@borism/balancing-creativity-and-
usabilit...](https://medium.com/@borism/balancing-creativity-and-
usability-9bb2cd0fe929)

------
JeanMarcS
If the search area is not on top right, everybody will loose time looking for
it. Web is not art anymore. It's mainstream. It might be sad, but well...

Just look at all the rant there are when an app change a bit of it's design.
You want adoption by users ? Make it easy for them.

Is it frustrating for designers ? I bet so. But can you imagine living
somewhere where every shop have its own design and way of sorting things ?
Imagine a supermarket where products will be stores in alphabetic order ?

Seems a good idea, you won't have to search for the good line any more. But
it'll have to survive long enough to customer to adapt.

Well, now imagine every supermarket having those disruptives ideas.

Maybe in a future where we'll all have time for it, if we won't have to work
more than 5-10 hours a week. Why not ? Until then, let's keep it simple.

------
Yhippa
I was going to blame Bootstrap for this but then found this on the site:
[https://expo.getbootstrap.com](https://expo.getbootstrap.com). Some really
good examples of innovative design even using good old Bootstrap.

------
pcarolan
I think he left SEO as a reason out of this article. We're now building
websites as much for humans as for google crawlers to read them, which means
meeting standards of accordance in order to even participate in the SEO game.
H1, H2, H3 tags, layout, and content headers don't have to look the same or be
layed out or structured the same, but many sites have deviated from these
formats at their own peril only to return to the warm embrace of conformity.
Not to mention that Amp is basically a design standard as much as a content
standard.

------
thrownaway954
WordPress

"WORDPRESS IS POWERING 26% OF THE WEB"

[https://digital.com/blog/wordpress-
stats/](https://digital.com/blog/wordpress-stats/)

------
kuon
Every time I try to do something original I go back to something generic
because of the following reasons:

\- Supporting all devices makes custom design really hard, with need to design
for phones, tablets, PC in all kind of browser window size/ratio. Different
screen size, dpi and input type. \- Accessibility is really hard with out of
the ordinary designs. \- A website must "give out its content" in seconds. You
cannot establish a relation with the user like, say, in games.

------
ryanisnan
Truth be told, when a website is totally unconventional, it has my attention
for a short time, generally on account of novelty.

Once that has worn off, unless the site is exceedingly usable, memorable or
memorable, I'm out.

It's taxing to have to visually search, analyze, scaffold, and navigate a new
mental model of how I expect a website to behave.

And therein lies the problem, people have expectations of websites, and it is
generally in their best interest to conform to existing standards.

------
TylerH
In the past: holy grail layout

Now: masonry layout / infinite scrolling

------
alan_n
I don't think anyone has mentioned it apart from the fact most people would
find these confusing, but these types of layouts look like accessibility
nightmares, and for what benefit? Making something look a bit nicer?

I mean, it's fine if the main goal of the website is to be artistic, but as
others have pointed out, that's not the main goal of most websites, it's
communicating information.

------
deltron3030
Do they look the same? Or does the differentiation just take place on a lower
level of detail that is hidden to the author of the article?

------
Deinos
Donald Norman does a good job explaining why in The Design of Everyday Things.
I am sure most of you have probably read it, but if you haven't...
[https://www.amazon.com/Design-Everyday-Things-Donald-
Norman/...](https://www.amazon.com/Design-Everyday-Things-Donald-
Norman/dp/0465067107/)

------
anotheryou
Swiss style design solved much of bad design.

If you divert from that you better have a reason and be good at it or just
layer something unique on top.

------
ryu2k2
All webdevs use the same tools that push certain directions. No webdev has the
time to be creative and try out new things so they build each website the same
way.

Diversity is found near exclusively in the domain of homepages built by people
not in the business that didn't make their website to put on a resume to proof
they can use whatever tool is currently in.

------
password03
I prefer same type design as opposed to going off piste..

In fact, if I want to leard about something or somebody I will often choose
Wikipedia primarily over something else because I know it's format and can get
straight to digesting the information I came for.

(The issue of me using a crowdsourced platform as a prioritised source of
something else for a different discussion)

------
blunte
Depends on the purpose of the website. If the purpose is to convey
information, then there will be quite some similarities between websites that
share that purpose.

If the purpose is to use the web as a medium of artistic expression, then you
can see some variety. But that's likely a small percentage of websites by
purpose.

------
zallarak
"Type Primer" was a revealing and relevant read for this topic. Design is
about functionality, and good typography and alignment can often-times get you
there. Colors, shapes, etc. are interesting for art; but when someone needs to
use what you've built, ensuring functionality is clear is crucial.

------
zapzupnz
I don't understand what the author was aiming for with this. "Designers are
lazy and unimaginative; why don't they all make their websites look like these
unusable, ugly explosions in a type foundry?"

I wouldn't even ~~be able to~~ want to read a static document that looked like
those examples.

------
criddell
Matthew Butterick wrote about this 5 years ago:

[https://unitscale.com/mb/bomb-in-the-garden/](https://unitscale.com/mb/bomb-
in-the-garden/)

Even publications that produce a beautiful paper product seem to be willing to
accept a garbage design when they post it online.

------
mrhappyunhappy
Off topic but these days I load every website in reader view. It’s amazing how
annoying custom fonts, sizes and colors become once you get used to reader
view for everything. Doesn’t matter what font, font size, color or layout you
use - I won’t see it and I love it.

~~~
satori99
I do this too. I scan the first paragraph or two and if I decide it is worth
reading, I hit the reader button.

I really couldn't care less about modern web design -- Just show me the text.

~~~
mrhappyunhappy
You can set every page to open in reader view automatically by pressing and
holding that icon I think.

------
z3t4
If you compare web sites that are hand crafted to web sites created with a CMS
and template, of course the hand crafted sites will be more unique. If you
want to master design and user interfaces, you must first learn all the rules,
but then you must break them!

------
r00dY
"Somewhere between $20m and $100m ARR,

All marketing sites converge on an identical design"

[https://twitter.com/jasonlk/status/1004366817035313152](https://twitter.com/jasonlk/status/1004366817035313152)

------
dgdg
Because of Bootstrap. Everyone uses it. Every old website that looked
different in the past, now does a UI refresh (by just using Bootstrap out of
the box with minimal customisation) and becomes another one of those the same
looking websites.

~~~
wild_preference
Outside of the HN comment bubble, nobody uses Bootstrap. And it doesn't
explain the examples in TFA.

~~~
david-cako
Speaking anecdotally, up to around 2016 every other website used Bootstrap or
Foundation, often with minimal customization, just because it looks and works
well out of the box on all devices. Now it seems like it's getting better, but
generic UI components are an extremely relevant aspect.

Promethease is a good example. Years later a bootstrap website signals to me
"it's about the functionality, not the design".
[https://promethease.com/](https://promethease.com/)

Before that everything was jQuery UI. Government websites still use a ton of
it. All of Colorado's web portals are built with it. And now things are
shifting towards UI frameworks "plus more", like Ionic, which adds a bunch of
design/devops workflow and cross platform functionality.

------
programminggeek
Lord help them when they realize that all designed things tend to look the
same.

Within a particular generation, all things tend toward a familiar design.
There is a herd mentality to fit in with the crowd, allowing for only minor
differences.

------
Konryan
Those examples make me very, very glad all the websites 'look the same'.

~~~
LyndsySimon
Indeed. The web is more consistent than its ever been, and I think that's a
very good thing - it means that I'm not often surprised when I scroll down and
the page moves to the right (I'm looking at you, Apple...)

------
skimberk1
All of the real content lives outside the context. [http://sebastian.io/monte-
fischer-design-school/](http://sebastian.io/monte-fischer-design-school/)

------
pssflops
I can't think of another website that even remotely resembles superbad [0] and
that's quite okay with me. [0]: [http://superbad.com](http://superbad.com)

------
deegles
"People spend most of their time browsing other websites"

Yes, it's a truism, but it explains why site designs converge. Fewer people
will be willing to learn your site's custom layout and behavior.

------
happertiger
Man, all of those models look like flash websites. That’s the problem. The
unconstrained mess of deconstructed html, the Skeuomorph movement and
reconstruction of architecture in the browser,

------
shshhdhs
None of these “redesigned web” examples are balanced or readable. While I’m
not convinced today’s design is the most optimal, I’d prefer them over any of
these futuristic examples

------
jonathanmarcus
"Generic fonts"

The web had ~ 5 system fonts before Web Fonts were available in 2008 / 2009.

Now the web has many thousands of the best fonts ever created by the world's
best foundries.

~~~
cronix
Yes, another "cool" thing slowing down loading/rendering the site. "Waiting
for fonts.googleapis.com"...

------
madamelic
Designers: "Let's make it avant garde"

Business People: "Let's make it fast"

Developers: "Choose one"

------
jordache
why do all cars look the same? why do all magazine covers look the same? why
do all the graphics on cable news channels look the same?

These are questions that do not require an article worth of words for
analysis..

------
tambourine_man
Says the guy writing on medium.

They don't, you're reading the wrong sites.

------
buboard
It's a broader problem. Why do all phones look the same?

------
systematical
Why do all cars look the same? Houses? I could go on.

------
mproud
Readability and legibility are important, too.

------
wolco
Because everyone decided to use a framework.

It helped standardize design.

I'm against this but I can see the benefits of the same layout.

