No, this is not about plagiarism.
Imagine my surprise when Jeffrey Zeldman blogged about a list of 60 WordPress themes. A few minutes before that, I found Douglas Bowman bookmarking another list, also from Smashing Magazine. It’s like my feed reader was trying to tell me something: yes, a list article can bring an interesting discussion if you’ll just let it.
Back to Zeldman’s post, which started a discussion on whether you should use existing themes for your own design:
…Even if you are a designer, you may ask yourself if you really need to perform that next site redesign from scratch.
Every once in a while I get clients that specifically want existing themes to be customized instead of starting from scratch, so clearly there is a demand for the practice. If clients have enough initiative to choose it as a solution, then why not? Does it take more effort to find and customize than start from scratch? Depends on how comfortable you are with someone else’s code, how much you trust the other designer’s expertise, and how much you need to customize.
The bulk of the debate will probably lie mostly in this situation, but to me it boils down to don’t reinvent the wheel, but don’t get complacent either. While it is a shortcut for building a website, it is not a shortcut for conceptualizing the website.
So the other situation is this: Sometimes I envy all the beautiful themes and templates out there because I don’t really get an opportunity to use them for myself. Does choosing to use someone else’s work for a web designer’s own website make sense? It seems counterintuitive but a real problem: sometimes we barely have time to dedicate to our own projects. Sometimes we just want to use something ready-made and have fun with it.
Although there are frameworks for practically level of development these days, from CSS to JS to PHP to whole themes, they are created specifically as tools for designers; they aren’t really products for designers as consumers. What I’m talking about are the real themes that are smart enough, beautifully-designed enough to meet your discerning needs. It could be as stark as Cutline or as detailed as WordFolio: compare this and this. (Now that would be good idea for a list article: websites that are highly customized versions of existing themes. Not to mention a good source of inspiration. A niche gallery, even!)
We could probably exclude portfolio sites since web designers would prefer to show off their skills on them—but even that argument can be ruled out if the customization is custom enough. Take blogs, tumblelogs, and other secondary sites that still belong to a web designer but don’t necessarily need a design from scratch. The issues with the client scenario website still apply, but there’s the added pressure of being your own worst critic.
Would you be confident enough to use one, or would you lose sleep at night without customizing at least some bit of it to keep your design cred intact? It doesn’t have to be a bad thing; it could be a different type of challenge.
There’s some hullaballoo over this insanely long and diversely designed article on the death of the blog post. Jason Santa Maria, one of the first to talk about this, calls it “art direction in web design”. Smashing Magazine calls it the “blogazine” trend.
And while many people, like me, are thankful this discussion has reached mainstream status, since Smashing Magazine is one of the hottest web properties out there, and their word is basically gospel for a lot of people, others found problems with its actual message.
Let’s start at the very beginning. The title and first paragraph alone make the likes of Shaun Inman cringe:
ugh, I don’t think @smashingmag could have missed the point more. http://shaun.in/g/3j Design for content’s sake, not design’s sake.
Although original talk of art direction laments the lax in creativity that has stemmed from the death of hand-coded personal pages and the rise of automated content management systems that power blogs, I don’t think you should attack the blog post format just because it looks boring. Unfortunately that’s how most people understand the purpose of design—to make things look more interesting, and little else.
Pushing yourself to create original layouts and designs customized to the content of each post is a fascinating and entertaining way to build a blog. [...]
Designing a creative layout for each new blog post, based on the content itself, requires skill, patience, dedication to the content and, most of all, effort on the part of the designer!
Those are pretty good reasons for pushing a custom layout reminiscent of magazine design, but there needs to be more. That’s why it’s important that the term “art direction” should be the term used. It’s more than just a trend. It’s actual understanding of how content—text, images, video, numbers—can be arranged so that it is consumed effectively.
Ironically, many have complained that the article itself is difficult to read. Throwing chunks of content around and away from the typically linear layout for the sake of demonstrating your point is not going to cut it. If people have more trouble reading this way, your design failed and you’re better off dropping the embellishments.
I think overall, Smashing Magazine did a noble deed in introducing the concept to the masses, but it needed to be a little more refinement than your run-of-the-mill list article. The upside is, their topics are certainly leveling up, as with a lot of things in web design these days.
Is this art direction/blogazine “trend” the future? Maybe, maybe not. It’s great to look at the long history of print design and try to apply some part of it to web design, but the best thing about the web—its dynamic nature, from clicking and scrolling to serving API calls and database queries—should be factored in too.
I’m no master of writing wicked linkbait, getting a thousand crazy linkage, reaching the frontpage of Digg, and so on. In a way, I pride myself with that, because most of this kind of content is downright boring.
Think about it, another 35 ways to do this or that list, do we need that?
At times, absolutely. Smashing Magazine is a proof of that, it’s often a great resource, since they’ve done all your research. Glancing over the content is boring though, as is writing that kind of posts, in my opinion. I guess they like it though, or make a bundle of it.
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