Paul Hammond bemoans how everyone’s sites are looking the same, prompted by Heather Powazek’s exhortation for new design. I wrote about this a couple of years ago, saying that Orient looks pretty much like kryogenix looks pretty much like Caveat Lector looks pretty much like Simon Willison’s weblog looks pretty much like Textism looks pretty much like Zeldman in a discussion of “anonymity of style“. I did then go on to say that “perhaps this era of relatively plain (but very pretty looking, and fairly minimalist) site designs is an interim period while we find our feet in this relatively new medium“. Has this happened? For a while, I thought that the Zen Garden was the counterpoint to this argument; it shows how design can be incredibly varied on exactly the same content. No-one’s actually doing that, though. It’s not just that we’ve got too many people who are just using the default templates for their weblogs (and all sites are weblogs now, right?), meaning that their sites look exactly the same, but that, as Heather says, “I long for the diversity of the time before weblogs (BW) when life was more than a two or three column layout“. Look at the three best designers I know, Zeldman, Jon Hicks, and Douglas Bowman. While their sites are very pretty, they fall into Heather’s black hole of two-and-three-column designs. If the best and the brightest are coming up with simply graphical variants on this type of design, what hope the rest of us?
Possibly the reason that everyone’s got this type of design is that it makes the best sense for usability. I mean, all buses are roughly the same shape: they’re a big long box with wheels on. No-one builds a bus that is one person wide and 144 people high, for example. This isn’t because bus designers aren’t creative, or becuase they’re unable to do anything other than copy their predecessors, it’s because that’s the best shape for a bus. So one concentrates (if one concentrates at all on bus design) on little things: the shape of the wheel arches, the fittings, the doors. Look at cars that are acknowledged as a triumph of design, like the Aston Martin DB9 or the Jaguar E-Type (or the Fiat Coupe, heh heh). Yes, these are beautiful cars. But they have four wheels and a steering wheel and a windscreen and the pedals are in the same place as a Lada Riva. Apart from how the Riva looks like two boxes in a pile and the E-Type looks like a big shiny dick with two chairs in, they’re the same in concept. Perhaps weblog sites have to also be the same: two column layouts aren’t like design, they’re like wheels. You have to have them to go forward, and that’s not negotiable.
And this is Cookie cutter design, revisited, written , and concerning Uncategorized
Comments
Roberto
Ben
I’d been working on a new design for my site for about 3 months, on and off. I’d decided I wanted to dump the CMS I’d written in favour of WordPress, since I was fed up of the bugs in my code, not having the time or inclination to fix them or add new features like RSS feeds. Ultimately though I ditched the design I’d come up with (mockup here), fed up of fixing an interminable stream of layout bugs in Internet Explorer.
Within about a week I came up with a new design, which admittedly did take a little while to get working (thanks to Doug Bowman and Eric Meyer’s work I was able to implement a flexible three-column layout) but is far, far less busy than any other design I’ve ever come up with. When I think of the blogs I read the most and enjoy reading, they’re usually those with a similar minimalist aesthetic; Daring Fireball and Textism for instance. Thus, my thinking was, I can add stuff later if I want to; the focus of my site should be the writing, not how it looks.
The question is, how many of these sites exist as vessels for opinion and news, and how many of them are showcases for technological progression? Obviously people who work in web development will want to demonstrate their abilities; previous incarnations of my site have tended towards showing off rather than simply serving a purpose. I would hypothesise that as designers tend towards using their sites for practical purposes, they will drift towards a less experimental and more conventional design of site. There is something comforting about reading a site using 11px Verdana on a white background with adequate use of whitespace and linespacing. Consistency, I guess, is what we really are gravitating towards.
Jon Hicks
I do try to do exciting, innovative layouts, but a each time, a ‘certain browser’ makes a crap attempt at displaying it, and plans have to be ‘cut back‘.
sil
“I also think that a factor is the amount of technology you have to master these days to create a website: a scripting language started with P, possibly a database, XHTML, Javascript, CSS, accessibility, color theory… after learning all that I still have to be a good designer?”
Part of the problematic thing there is that there aren’t any decent tools. People should not have to write XHTML by hand and learn about it. People should not have to understand accessiblilty in detail. They do, though, because all our tools are shit. For a start, the best tool on the market, by all accounts, is Dreamweaver MX. However, that costs over three hundred pounds. Maybe that’s worth it to professional designers, but it isn’t to everyone, and it would also amount to a Macromedia Tax on anyone who wants to put a website up. And do tools say “this page you’ve created doesn’t meet the WAI accessilbity guidelines“? Do they say “the HTML created here isn’t valid“? Do they say “this JavaScript you’ve put in here won’t work in Opera“? Not that I’ve seen, although I’m happy to be corrected. If tools did say these things, and they were easy to use (so that you didn’t need to be a professional designer with lots of tool experience to use them) and they were free (so that it was easier for people to use the tool than not use the tool) then we might see some improvement. Until then, you either have the option of using a tool and accepting (or not caring about) its limitations, using a tool and then hand-hacking its produced content into proper shape, or hand-hacking from the start. None of these are good things. Stuff like ASP.NET might be good, except that (would you believe it?) it’s part web development tool and part MS-monopoly bolsterer. Does Dreamweaver MX integrate as well with Python CGI code as it does with Cold Fusion MX? I doubt it, because Macromedia want you to buy more of their products. This is why Free Software is better for tools, because the authors have less of an agenda to push (well, ideally they do; whether that’s actually the case is a matter for discussion).
Note that weblog software is a damned good tool for creating a website without technical knowledge, and it does very well at it. On the other hand, it results in lots of people with the same look to their site, which is what we were complaining about in the first place :)
sil
Jon,
Oops. Don’t take what I said as criticism. I quite believe that you’re limited by the tools available to you, and browser support thereon, rather than by your creative genius. The point here is that if you can’t find a way around that certain browser’s problems, certainly none of the rest of us (who don’t have the design talent to conceive the cool ideas, let alone the ability to try and get them implemented in code) will be able to either…
Dorothea Salo
Honey, I never made any claims to being a designer.
sil
Dorothea,
Hey, I’m with you. Take a look around this place. Two-column designs all the way. This teal-coloured design that I’ve got here at the moment annoys the shit out of me, but I don’t have the design skill to fix it. What I’m not sure about is whether complaining about two-and-three-column designs is a worthwhile criticism (because there are loads of alternatives which no-one is exploring) or whether it’s pointless griping (because there’s really no better way to do it). All I can offer here is anecdotal evidence; I’ve built two designs for this place that weren’t standard two-or-three-column ones: The Daily Kryogenix and the design which required rightward scrolling rather than up-and-down scrolling (no screenshot). Both of them failed the user appreciation test: everyone hated them. So perhaps a bog-standard design is what everyone actually wants.
Roberto
Hey, the Daily Kryogenix was nice! I thought it was a great idea…
Anyway, who cares for design these days? The only layout I see is the one from Bloglines.
Rob
Great entry, interesting comments. I can see I shall have to relaunch no, 2 self with the entry on usability/beauty that I’ve been repeatedly failing to produce.
Roberto – The only layout I see is the one from Bloglines. Me too and it makes me so sad I almost want to cry. Perhaps we should think about RSS the way the Egyptian God Thamus thought about writing:
‘...for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing, they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality…’
We should all get off our lazy aRSSes and go visit some sites.
Tom
But at least with something like Bloglines we are getting away from how a website looks to what content it has. Not good for blogs discussing CSS perhaps, but not a bad idea otherwise.
sil
Tom: yep. You get to mainline the information, unadulterated by design or colours or fonts. Like browsing the web using Netscape 2: none of this styling rubbish gets in your way. You just get information in its purest form. Now, that’s important; I read people’s writings because I want to see what they’ve written. However, Rob, above, and I have had an ongoing argument for some time now about the place for beauty in this sort of thing. If we cut out the framing and just get the information, we receive what we wanted, but perhaps lose something undefinable in the process. I’m awaiting Rob’s collected thoughts on this matter, as well as everyone else’s!
Rob
There’s a place for beauty in everything.
Just ask someone who knows anything about typography.
Perhaps it’s a little bit like the Cambrian Explosion, when Nature was “experimenting” with new forms of design—most of them being ripped off from the genic pool, leaving only the fittest.
In the beggining of the web, people were still experimenting with ideas and possible designs. Probably the limited technology also helped people being more creative, trying to escape from the technological constraints.
Eventually, only the fittest designs survived, those consagrated (sp?) as usable and accessible. Like most animals we see today have four limbs, one mouth or two eyes.
I also think that a factor is the amount of technology you have to master these days to create a website: a scripting language started with P, possibly a database, XHTML, Javascript, CSS, accessibility, color theory… after learning all that I still have to be a good designer?