Showcases and Galleries Make for Derivative Web Design
Web designers like showcasing web design. There are HTML5 galleries, CSS3 galleries, blog posts that highlight lists of “best of…” ecommerce, photo portfolio, typography focused, blue themed sites. If you follow a lot of web designers on Twitter, like I do, you’ll be inundated with links to these lists and galleries on a daily basis. Which is a problem, because it leads to derivative web design.
What’s your inspiration?
Web designers use CSS frameworks, grid systems and best practices to provide the most functional and easy to deploy websites possible. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that. Taken to extremes, however, it starts to make everything look the same.
It’s like trying to differentiate a row of identical houses by painting them a range of colors. At first glance they’re varied, but underneath the colorful exterior, they’re all just the same. At a time when technology is giving us the tools to greatly increase our capacity for original design, that’s unfortunately what seems to be happening when it comes to website creation.
Great artists are not inspired merely by their own medium. Innovators certainly aren’t.
“When Monet traveled to Paris to visit the Louvre, he witnessed painters copying from the old masters. Having brought his paints and other tools with him, he would instead go and sit by a window and paint what he saw.”
Monet was an innovator because he looked beyond the accepted norms, beyond his medium, for inspiration. If web design remains too self referential then it will increasingly fail to innovate.
My most important magazine subscription isn’t .NET Magazine, or Practical Web Design. It’s Vogue. I wrote recently how I love to utilize aspects of propaganda art in web design. I look for great textures in nature. I sketch and try my hand at drawing clumsy looking robots!
When I want to encourage my own creativity I try and stay away from the computer for as long as possible. And I particularly try and avoid huge lists of “great websites”. That’s not to say that I’m necessarily the most original or exceptionally creative designer, but I always want to push myself.
When a showcase isn’t just a showcase
I retweeted a link to a blog article that highlighted a lot of great websites today. I commented that I rarely do that. The difference was that while it used a number of examples of great websites, the article was examining the wider issue of the uses of illustration in web design. It used the websites not just say, “hey, aren’t these great?”, but to make specific points about how they were using different aspects of design. In examining the general concept of illustration for different purposes, the article was inspiring creativity rather than implying “you should do it like this”.
It’s not wrong to look at examples of great web design. It’s only wrong to do it to the detriment of other sources of inspiration, or when you notice your work following too closely in the style of what you’ve seen.
Innovation is dangerous
Skilled practitioners of any craft, working expertly within accepted norms, are always likely to make a good living. I know that I can implement pretty much any web design that I see, or make a good (or even great) looking website that conforms to all best practices. Hell, there’s a thousand blog articles out there saying that to make a great website you should always have x, y and z.
Innovation, originality, it isn’t like that. It’s hugely risky. Vincent van Gogh’s post-Impressionism style wasn’t appreciated or recognized until decades after his death. Pushing back against what’s expected, and trying something completely different, can blow up in your face. I want to try and do what I don’t know that I can do. I want to follow a great piece of advice I was given recently.
If you’re going to fail, do it spectacularly.
I want to be an exceptional artist as well as an exceptional web designer. I hope that hundreds and thousands of others share that desire. Are prepared to fail spectacularly as well as succeed amazingly. That’s what’s going to lead to truly great web design…web art.
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