Looking over the comments on HN, people seem to be focused on the current popularity of Twitter Bootstrap and Flat Design, but the original article posed a more general question across decades of web development. Just counting the last few design cycles, we've seen (1) web 2.0 rounded corners and gradients, then (2) iOS-inspired skeuomorphism and now (3) flat design.
People redesign websites to avoid looking "dated" and copying what's currently popular is the quickest way to achieve the look of "newness". The same is true for a new website built from scratch. Nothing is preventing someone in 2013 from designing a web 2.0 website except for the fear that it will make them look old. And if you're a business, you don't want to lose customers because your competition has a more modern looking site. As a result, everyone moves together as a pack in the same direction until someone else comes out in front and changes the direction of the pack. This is how culture has operated for thousands of years. Twitter Bootstrap is not the reason why everything looks the same.
> Twitter Bootstrap is not the reason why everything looks the same.
Except, Twitter Bootstrap filled that niche of a semi-generic framework distributed with a 'good-enough' design theme. In the web world I can't think of an example before. There were Wordpress theme frameworks that came without design and expected you to craft your own, and there were good designs created without thought for adapting the code.
Nothing said you're not a designer, but build with this and it'll look good before.
Now whether the 'Bootstrap look' became popular because of Bootstrap, or Bootstrap was buying into a design trend that was just starting I don't know. But both trended at the same time.
Really, what we are saying when it comes down to it, is that design choices are a form of communication. Staying 'modern' with your design is a decent shorthand for communicating a certain level of competence to your audience. I do wish that designers would look at it more broadly though. Perhaps it is not fair to compare web to print since print has had a longer history to draw from, but one of the things that I appreciate about print media is there is never just one 'go-to' style so fads don't get as tiresome because they rarely are pervasive.
In open-source, and even in startups, sometimes the project is a one person project.
Or a 2, 3, 4 or more but without frontend skills.
I don't have front-end skills. I mean, I can "play" with CSS, and layouts, and it may even look fine on my laptop or my 24", but I'm not a professional, neither know all the tricks and corner cases, and tested facts for certain browsers, and, etc... and don't have the time to go in deep with it.
Without going further... I'm playing right now with a personal project.
I like more my style, but I know it's going to suck in certain platforms I don't want to own, it's not responsive, etc so there is a high probability that I will use finally "more of the same".
I don't see anything wrong with using Bootstrap for projects like this. Bootstrap's LESS can be customized to further change the appearance. To me, Bootstrap sites stick out with their navbars and buttons. Change the main identifying features of bootstrap, and you get the best of both worlds...
Good points, but "minimalism" is still rather heavy on the code front. If you like at a typical minimal theme lately, just after excluding the majority of the HTML weight, there's still a lot of stuff being sent to the browser.
Ironically, simplicity and minimalism is still doesn't equate to a light-weight web page. It's possible, but few people seem to be going that route.
> For the world of design... there’s high value in simple
> typefaces, and noise-less, minimalistic design that’s easy
> to load and create for any device. If this type of design
> converts well, can be easily produced and increases the
> value you wish to attain... everything else in how the
> market works will trend in that direction.
>
> Sameness is a market effect, not a technological one.
This assumes that the thought put into many site designs is driven by metrics like conversion rates, etc. I suspect that this may only be true for 1 in 10 of the designs we see, and that the other 9 are actually just following what everyone else is doing. That's not to say that following what others is doing has no value, but that what is valued in the design is not improving things like conversion rates, but rather in making the site appear young and hip, etc.
So, still a market effect overall, just not usually for the reasons the author suggests.
>"For the world of design this means there’s high value in simple typefaces, and noise-less, minimalistic design that’s easy to load and create for any device."
I don't think minimalistic design necessarily creates sameness. Hundreds of sites using the same handful of frameworks for ease of load and creation across platforms certainly does.
I do agree, and I agree with most of the comments here as well - but the point I was making was agnostic of standards, principles or frameworks.
The point I was making was that sameness is a market effect, not a technological one. If everyone in the world started craving for Google Glass tomorrow and nothing else, everything in the world of design or systems architecture would trend in that direction in a reasonable amount of time. Trend in a sense wherein it is easily produced, etc. and other factors.
I think the trend is due to the types of devices we are switching from (laptops) and switching to (smart phones). It combines cost, performance, and responsiveness.
I designed and built an app in 2009 for detecting speed traps and I was all about skeuomorph. While the mobile app looks really good[1], The website was a nightmare to design[2]. A lot of design time went into carbon fiber backgrounds, gradient buttons and logos, glowing effects on images, and drop shadows. It had lots of images and extra <div> tags to simulate the look of the mobile app which ended up costing me in web performance speed and a non-existent mobile-web version.
The new mobile app I'm working on is minimal and a lot easier to convert into a web page[3]. I found a dark parallax Bootstrap theme I can modify and convert to mirror the mobile app. As people are mentioning, front end frameworks are making it a lot easier to create cheap, fast, responsive minimal site which work well on all platforms.
I think there is also some value to websites looking the same. Pick two native apps on the same platform, they will probably look the same, and users of that platform know how to use all of the standard controls and know the standard places to look for common actions. This is much less true of the web. So even if some design trend isn't really much of an improvement there may be some value to following it anyway rather than forcing people to learn a unique design on every website.
Inexperienced designers (e.g. a large percentage web developers) like flat design because it's easy. Switching from skeuomorphic (with nice-looking buttons, etc.) to flat (with simple boxes) lowers the threshold for just about anyone who knows basic HTML/CSS to make a website.
There was a time where lots of websites were built with flash, most of them looked different and some were really creative.
Nobody thought about responsive at that times.
I don't miss these websites at all.
I think building a website targeting desktop and mobile devices is a limiting factor in terms of creativity.
Very well put, and strikes a chord with me personally. Bootstrap and the like are popular for good reason - quick and easy to implement, a decent baseline of "looks good enough", etc. But of course, even with customization, sites built on popular frameworks do have a certain same-ness that cannot be avoided.
It's appropriate here to point out my own creation, edit room (http://www.edit-room.com) - its a different kind of web design tool - no frameworks, no boilerplate, just your creativity and your content, in a flexible and responsive canvas that's true to the web. Part of my philosophy for building this app is that handcrafted design is a good thing - you can't always rely on frameworks to do all the design thinking for you - and there is still a place for creativity in web design.
Most websites look the same because standards are the same, Usability, UX, Navigation, Typography, Layouts etc .. they all have share common principles. and it is difficult to do a big change without breaking these standards.
Some of it has to do with cost also. You want a boiler-plate bootstrap site? No problem. You want something new and innovative? That's going to cost you. A lot of customers aren't trying to set web trends, they just want to follow the leaders. And the leaders set trends because they have the time and money to ask "are we doing this right"?
true. small agencies and freelancers dont have funds to do design research like huge companies have. max they can do is do some a/b testing if they are 'good ones' and choose between one of the latest trends the big guys have set.
People redesign websites to avoid looking "dated" and copying what's currently popular is the quickest way to achieve the look of "newness". The same is true for a new website built from scratch. Nothing is preventing someone in 2013 from designing a web 2.0 website except for the fear that it will make them look old. And if you're a business, you don't want to lose customers because your competition has a more modern looking site. As a result, everyone moves together as a pack in the same direction until someone else comes out in front and changes the direction of the pack. This is how culture has operated for thousands of years. Twitter Bootstrap is not the reason why everything looks the same.