The stagnation of web design
When something big happens in tech — the most recent example being Microsoft’s attempt to buy Yahoo! — bloggers oftentimes link to TechMeme to show a permalink of the ongoing online discussion. As they should, it’s a great resource (as well as a great example of how one guy can make something extremely useful if he executes well).
As I was browsing through the blogs that had linked to my Pixish articles last week, I noticed people linking to searches on Google Blog Search whenever they wanted to mention the online discussion. It worked well enough, but there was obviously no threading or ranking, because that’s not what Blog Search is about.
That got me thinking, why isn’t there a TechMeme for web design?
That, of course, also got me to thinking about how maybe I should start one. Which then, as it always does, immediately started me thinking up good domain names (I’m partial to designermeme.com).
But then I stopped, realizing I was missing something. TechMeme works because there are thousands of people blogging about Google, Apple, et al. at all hours of the day. These companies are constantly pushing for PR of their latest initiatives and bloggers hoping to get traffic out of it are constantly pushing out new blog posts about them. Few of the posts are good, most are just me-toos, but it keeps a dynamic, updated conversation going all the time.
That’s why TechMeme works. DesignerMeme (or whatever) would never work.
The Pixish flare-up was the most excitement web design’s seen in weeks. We’re so bored with the stagnant web design industry we jump at the chance for a little drama, a little something to ruffle our tail feathers and make us fire up WordPress/MT/whatever. I guess the last brouhaha was the IE8 mess and before that you have to go all the way back to last year for more of Jeff Croft’s web standards rants.
Have you looked at what passes for web design news these days? Design Float is an unreadable trash heap of Top 10’s that bubble to the top with just a handful of duplicate votes, deli.cio.us’s popular page is a shell of itself, Digg’s Design category has always been worthless, and then you have all those sites that shan’t be named (CSSBeauty, CSSVault, CSSRemix, etc. ad naseum).
A DesignerMeme would only have something interesting on it once or twice a month. Every other second of every other day it’d be populated by junk no one would want to read and that I can’t believe people can force themselves to write — example titles being “The top 5 best ways to find new clients”, “Top 10 CSS design secrets you can’t live without”, “50 reasons XHTML’s better than HTML”, “101 reasons HTML’s better than XHTML”, “10,000 Clean & Usable WordPress Themes”, “How to use the pen tool in Illustrator”, “The stagnation of web design”.
But I guess you can’t really blame the design bloggers — they keep rehashing the same tripe because there’s nothing else to write about.
It’s been disappointing watching the stagnation of web design the last few years. I guess it’s largely why I’ve been blogging only in fits and starts for so long. Individual browser innovations (of the -webkit and -moz variety) seem like they’ll always be overshadowed by IE’s marketshare. Those who want to adopt and learn CSS and standards have probably already done so. All the innovation and excitement lately has been in frameworks, business models, Javascript, video — none of it in web design. And none of us see anyway that’s really going to change anytime soon. As a result many of us don’t write, while others write vacuous garbage.
I don’t have a solution. But as I wrote before, it all most likely means that — for the first time in a longtime — I’ll just be finding a few new ways to spend my time outside of web design.