Judgment Day is coming. The robot invasion. Everything we created to make our jobs easier is turning against us. In fact, this is what it was all leading to.
Just think about it. We have invested all our efforts in technical and philippine phone number search technological progress, and now we can be sure that programs and sites will work properly, and that the right user interface model has been chosen. But even this seemed to us not enough. We have created recipes for making websites. So let me ask you a question: what is the point of having designers if there is a recipe?
People, our future is bleak. We have begun our own end. In a few years, we will have no jobs.
History lesson
Whether you call yourself a web designer, a visual designer, a UX guru, or just a “creative” (oh my!), we are all part of a larger current that spans centuries. We all share a common ancestor: the graphic artist. Sure, our fields are different. We interact with pixels and frequencies, not ink and paper. But we can’t isolate ourselves from our past. Web design is simply an evolution of graphics, and it’s the same thing. We share a common history. And in that history lies the key to salvation.
Graphic design was born in the 15th century with the invention of the printing press. At first, layouts were primitive, consisting mainly of straight columns and drop caps. This model persisted for a long time, but by the beginning of the 20th century, under the influence of the Art Nouveau movement, designs became more ornamental, with the addition of curls.
graphic design
I hope you will forgive me for the brevity of this account. The details are not important to the point I am trying to make: design has reached maturity. All the rules by which web design is developed have long been established, and we have all the means to learn how and when it is time to break them.
On the other hand, web design is infantile
We've almost made progress in understanding that centered placement isn't always good, fallen in love with skeuomorphism and shiny buttons, and annoyingly call it flat design. What's even more annoying is that we continue to insist that it's a trend . For the record, lack of embellishment is not a trend, it's just graphic design without the bullshit . But let's get back to the point.
We work with different layouts, asymmetry, design windows, we do good layout, we have blending modes and animation, Retina screens. We are ready to experiment. Today is the best time to be a web designer than ever.
So why do all websites look the same? Have we simply stopped caring? Have website design services become too much of a challenge? Are web designers incapable of coming up with new, creative website designs? No, I don’t think so. However, we do face some big obstacles to new ideas. And the first of them starts with the letter K.
How Content Changed Design
About 12 years ago I started my career in a small publishing house. I was a designer for a small chess magazine.
And in the world of magazines, content matters. Almost all of my colleagues were editors. Even though all the articles were written before I did the final layout, I had the opportunity to ask the editor to shorten or lengthen headings and paragraphs to make them fit better. We were a team, content and design together.
On the web, of course, content is a completely different beast. With the invention of CMS (Content Management System), everything changed. On the one hand, it allows users around the world to edit their texts and update sites automatically. That's great.
On the other hand, CMS has fundamentally changed the process of filling a site with content. What happens when we exclude ourselves from working with content?
Well, first of all, content and design are no longer one and the same. We no longer pair meaningful headlines with appropriate images. We no longer stitch together layouts to fit a particular article.
Instead, we produce systems, empty templates to be filled in. We break websites into sections and write style g