How many times have you come across a new weblog discussing a specific niche sporting a fairly too common WordPress theme? Probably more often than we’d all want to see. A large number of new weblogs these days are launched with default themes and styling that it’s now becoming hard to identify sites based solely on design and visual identity.
The WordPress Phenomenon
In 2005, default blog templates were fairly “simple,” to put it nicely, until Blogger went through a design refresh with spankin’ new designs to boot. The free theme craze took on a larger scale when WordPress introduced a flexible theme system less than a year after, allowing web designers to apply XHTML/CSS–based designs in a more manageable way. This opened an opportunity for designers to showcase their skills to attract more work, but inadvertently opened a can of worms as the theme distribution system was compromised and used for unethical link building by spam sites masquerading as “sponsors.”
Yet still, the availability of free self–publishing solutions and the growth of the problogging industry resulted in an increasing rate at which new weblogs are launched, a good number of which can be considered “commercial problogs” and a good percentage also run by prominent individuals discussing specific expertise and topics. However, a good majority make do with a free WordPress theme, sometimes even a sponsored one, not knowing how it affects their branding and identity. This goes for company weblogs and well–known individuals, as well as all sorts of self–published “problogs.”
Content is King
It has been a web design adage — content is king — and it continues to hold true up to now. Your weblog and the rest of your site will only be as good as your content. But with today’s crowded blogosphere discussing the same topics, no matter how good a writer you are, there will always be blogs that are just as good (or even better) in your field.
Readers are struggling hard coping with various sources, and some will simply discard feed subscriptions based on design and presentation. Assuming that you write just as well as your peers, or competitors if you look at them that way, what will differentiate you will be your presentation of content and overall design style.
Your Identity, Your Design
Don’t expect your new blog to be taken seriously if you don’t have good content, but don’t expect it to stand out with only good content without a decent design. Everyone these days have the basic SEO, online marketing, and social networking skills to push our sites to various channels. Basically, it doesn’t take as much as it used to for a newcomer to get some web 2.0 mileage. But when you get that attention, make sure you make a good impression, not only with your content but also with your kickass design. Make users remember your site describing both content and design.
It doesn’t cost much to get a good designer to work on a personalized design and online identity, the benefits will be worth every dollar spent anyway. Just make sure you hire someone who groks web design 2.0 and doesn’t fall into these common pitfalls.
Written by Markku Seguerra, rebelpixel.com.
Having lived in several different countries and towns, public transport always has been a constant in my life and so have subway/tube maps. First time I arrived in London I was surprised how easy it was to navigate the London Underground Map, which in this form first was released in 1933.
(click for full size image)
The London Tube Map is a design classic and worldwide recognized as a symbol for London. When Harry Beck designed the map in it’s new format, he changed the until then standard geographical concept and decided only to implement the railway topology and not the geographical situation of London. Geographically correct the map would look like this. At the same time every non-underground clutter was removed and London had become a symmetrical pattern of straight and 45 degrees lines.
Although there are minor geographical distortions in the official London Tube Map, it’s beauty lays in the symmetry, the usage of equally spaced out distance between stations, the 45 degree angles and the usage of adequate whitespace. Even though the map features many subway stations (275) it is perfectly readable, even at smaller pocket sizes.
Becks’s style has often been imitated, been adapted by many other companies/towns, but never has anyone reached the same level of popularity with a tube map as Becks has with his London map. Both Amsterdam (NL), who even credit the London Transprt Museum on their map, and Tokyo have the same concept and perfectly manage it to ruin a great principle with clutter. Other towns, such as Paris, make their map unreadable with too much of text and too little contrast or add visual noise to an otherwise outstanding map such as Moscow.
Maybe I’ve lived too long in the UK, but the London Tube Map is one of the most brilliant designs I’ve ever seen and used.
It’s begun.
Actually, since list-style blog posts on design trends and other pretty things have been popular for a few years now, I’m sure the backlash has been happening for a while.
Now, it does make sense to organize your a complex article into easily digestible chunks, especially in a not exactly 100% comfortable to read environment such as the Web. It’s good to keep tabs on great new typefaces and graphics in your arsenal.
However, list articles have gained a bad reputation for other reasons because quality is put on the backburner. And there are a number parties responsible:
- The marketers: It’s easy to thank SEO for this phenomenon. A significant portion of internet marketing involves social media, and high-traffic sites like Digg just love the list format. It’s killer linkbait.
- The readers: The problem is lists don’t always contain what people need to truly learn. A lot of these people don’t know any better, and the explosion of lists distracts them from laying the foundations first.
- The internet: Why? There are great lists out there; people will need to separate the wheat from the chaff. But maybe, it’s the very nature of the Web that mutates the need to find the good stuff into the need to find as much stuff as possible or the quickest, easiest solution to a problem.
Jeffrey Zeldman’s article, The vanishing personal site, brings to light what many of us have been wondering about in the back of our heads for a while now. Social networks that provide features often found in a personal website captured our fancies and stretched our virtual personas in all directions. That goes for both the knowledgeable and not so knowledgeable in web development.
The Question
It’s not really a bad thing, which Zeldman also stresses. The question is, now that you’ve scattered yourself all over the place, how are you going to put yourself back together?
Not that you need to; I’m sure not everyone would be interested in painstakingly picking up the pieces one by one and gluing them together. That’s why FriendFeed became an instant hit. But if you ask me, using another social network to put them all together does not feel good. Not one bit. I’d consider it another convenient (even organic) way to spread my own content. But that’s it. I still dream of the day I manage to tastefully put my stuff together in one place. Like these websites:
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Will Harris shares some insight on working with designers. We often read about tips for designers by designers, but not tips for clients by clients. Still, both parties should read it (and print out the PDF, too!).
Designers (and professionals in related fields) will get great gems of advice that will make them go “oh, thank goodness he said that!” because it’s so common for clients to just sit there and say “I don’t like that” without giving any real reason behind their preference. A design project (again, this can apply to other fields) is the responsibility of both the designer and the client. They have to work together.
But let me digress a little bit. One thing that struck me while reading the article was Will’s first suggestion:
Choose your designer carefully. Look at their previous work. The best designers don’t have a “signature look.” Their sites look as different as their clients do. Awards don’t necessarily mean the design worked for the client. If you’re not sure about a design, go to sites they designed and ask their clients.
Do you agree that designers with more diverse-looking projects are better than those who maintain a signature look? On the one hand, it immediately leads a client into thinking that the designer has a wider skill set and can more easily meet their requirements especially if they’re fickle.
On the other hand, clients opt for designers with a consistent style exactly because they want to emulate that look on their own projects.
I think that in general, professionals start out not knowing exactly what they want to do, and try everything out first. As they grow older they start to specialize. As time passes, you’re supposed to be more sure of yourself and should be able to hold a distinguishable reputation among your peers. This can be said not only about the styles you create, but the skills you specialize in, the clientele you work with, and so on. I wouldn’t say this is the only way to go, but it seems to be the trend.
Welcome to hell.
Still on the subject of the dark side of the web: I found a contest for the ugliest website held last June. The winner, which turned out to be mytastynuts.com, won a free redesign package worth $1800. Now this could have been a little more buzzworthy if the contest and company site itself looked like there had been thought put into the design. Heck, if you ask me, the current mytastynuts.com looks better, and don’t really have the right to be doing redesigns.
Of course, there’s really no harm in entering a contest where a free redesign is up for grabs—even if it ends up being not much of an upgrade at all—but that’s the problem with web design: the threshold’s too easy to cross.
The ugliest website contest would also have gone viral if the site were designed in the ugliest manner possible. Something that looks like this (without looking like they’re ripping you off). But that’s the other problem with web design: not everybody “gets” good design.
- Many have high tolerance for badly designed sites and bad design in general. Put bluntly, they wouldn’t know if something looks ugly even if it hit them in the face. Sometimes design can depend on a person’s instinct and taste, but it can also suck
- Combine that with “it’s just a lowly website”, not something cooler like architecture, fashion, or an ad campaign, and it’s a steep, uphill battle.
- And to top it all off, there’s the thin line between design and decoration, which is the absence of purpose and real content. A website, more than any other designed entity, is nothing without content and function.
Don’t be such a downer
Okay enough with the pessimism. How do we get rid of said problems? Eliminate ignorance, for starters. Buckets of inspiration from CSS galleries and image bookmarking sites are always good to have, but it’s also important to know exactly what we should avoid.
I recommend grabbing some eyedrops before clicking any of the links below:
The next step is figuring out why said sites are on the list. But that’s for another (ugly) day.
One thing that struck me in Information Architects’ review of the iPad is how they noticed the UI guideline to make applications look like real-world objects:
Whenever possible, add a realistic, physical dimension to your application. The more true to life your application looks and behaves, the easier it is for people to understand how it works and the more they enjoy using it.
It’s a small detail, but it certainly reinforces the type of computing environment the iPad has: more abstracted than the usual PC/Mac/Unix operating systems and its desktop metaphor.
iA is none too pleased with this guideline, however, as the eyecandy enter kitsch territory and fails to solve interaction problems.
Using a book shelf for choosing a book is a consistent metaphor, but does it help you understanding the interface? Does it help in any way? Do you still like the hard to scan bookshelf with after looking at it for the 200th time? What if you have 200 books?
Note: I’m not saying that using quirky metaphors and plastering your app with special effects will kill the perspective to sell your app. Unfortunately the audience for kitsch is a bigger audience than the elitist UID guild. But usually phony design doesn’t have a long life span.
Metaphors should not distract or confuse, they must clarify. Apple and those that design for it love their beautiful interfaces and the metaphors that inspired it, and while attention to detail is highly admired, design abuse via mainstream device iPad, will become rampant. It’s tempting to pull out all the stops, but as with many things in life, exercise restraint.
To follow up on my post concerning your Knowledge Portfolio I thought it would be nice to gather what you find to be the essential books that any programmer or designer should have. Here is what I have come up with so far.
How about you?
During my stint as a web developer in the corporate world and my short stint as a freelance web designer I found that I would ask myself frequently if I could do design/development every single day for the rest of my life. The answer was always yes, if I could just do it on my own without having to worry about outside influences (aka clients). I always dreamed of an utopia where you could have fun designing and programming without any stress at all. The only criticism laid upon your work was the criticism placed by yourself.
I know that some designers/developers are able to enjoy all of their clients and all the work that they do. How do they do it? I have no idea, because I know that I was never even close to that. Once you invite a client in to pay the bills you lose a part of that freedom. Some clients wish to take all of that freedom away from you and those are the ones that you just don’t deal with.
The reason I say that you lose part of your freedom is because you aren’t painting a piece of art to be auctioned off to someone who happens to like your style (unless you do template design), but you are mixing your design tastes with that of the client. That’s where part of your freedom goes.
That’s why personal site design is so important. Every designer/developer needs her playground to experiment and have fun with. You can see it here on Whitespace every single day almost. I am on design #46 I believe for this site. The design moves along with my tastes for the moment and I get to see what works and what doesn’t. Many would argue that constantly changing the design can turn your readers off. This may certainly be the case, but no offence to your readers, at times you have to look out for your own happiness.
I believe if you want to do design your whole life there has to be a part of your day, week, month, year that you devote to your own work. Try your best to filter out what other’s will think of it and focus on how you feel about it. Hell, you don’t have to make every site you do a public one. Create a section that is just for you and have at it.
Even when you do this though, you can get burnt out from work, whether it be the corporate world or demanding clients. What keeps you going? How close have you been to just saying fuck it and moving on to something else? Can you do design your whole life?
A common entry you see on many web design blogs is the one where people are looking for inspiration when getting ready to tackle a new design. While I don’t advise looking at other sites before you begin to design your own, for some people this works really well. What I never see though is people recommending any Flash sites to look at. I wonder if most CSS/XHTML designers still hold a grudge (or whatever you wish to call it) against Flash sites because many of them still are nightmarish to say the least.
For example I love to look at 2advanced or Joshua Davis from an information design perspective (along with a visual design perspective) and see how I can learn from them. Granted most Flash sites I come across serve absolutely no purpose on the web, but I think if more designers open their minds to checking out the good ones then their designer inspiration toolbox will become that much more valuable.
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