No, Graphic Designers Aren't Ruining the Web

No, Graphic Designers Aren't Ruining the Web
jamieforrest.com

But I'm also finding increasingly that I feel like my face is being pushed through mush. Everything seems soft, or rounded, or pastel, or otherwise character-free. This button is blended, that panel is graduated. It's all free of any kind of personality.

It's mush.

And so many times it's slow to load, slow to render, unusable on anything other than the huge screen size used by the "designer," and I still can't find what I want.

Whose fault is that? Maybe it's not the graphic designer's fault, but it's certainly making the web an unpleasant, unrewarding, and sometimes downright frustrating experience.

But it looks gorgeous.

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:jamiefo...

As the author points out, it's not an issue of bandwidth so much as an issue of visual clutter and processor power—although watching a page try to make calls to a dozen separate web services before it will finish loading and let me interact with it smoothly is certainly frustrating. That's not necessarily the designer's fault, though, everyone shares the blame there.

No, the problem is that graphic designers generally approach web pages as if they were designing for print or television.

After many years working in large agencies in New York, I can count on one hand the number of "creatives" who knew any more about the technologies that make up the web than a little basic HTML 1.0, at best.

I started my career as a print designer in the 1990s. Designing for books and magazines, you had to understand your medium. Any print designer worth their salt regularly went on press checks, knew the difference between a sheet-fed litho and a web-fed offset press, how linescreens related to dpi measurements, how trapping worked, drum vs. flatbed scanning, all that.

Compare that to graphic designers for the web, who in my experience have little to no understanding of how a browser renders code, or how different services communicate.

The best graphic designers aren't trying to be programmers, but they know the medium they're working in, and they don't try to force it to be something it's not.

Beauty, usability, and performance aren't mutually exclusive concepts on the web. It's just that most clients only care about the first one (until the site has already launched), and most designers don't have enough knowledge of the second two.

Designers are also ruining the web because they are removing choice in how I view content.

HTML pages used to be designed such that they were a standard markup language. Thus I could change the settings of my browser if I preferred a dark background with light text. Now in the land of everything is a DIV and CSS is used to recreate the markup language, this is no longer possible -- at least not in a generic way. Not to mention it breaks browsing in a completely cross platform way (lynx, small screened devices, screen readers, etc.); you designer, will always forget at least one. And don't get me started on sites that do not load the content without javascript.

My preference would be that designers accepted the constraints of HTML. They are more than welcome to use CSS to offer my browser suggestions to how it should be rendered, but as the viewer, the final choice would be to me. If you MUST make the layout fit some exact format, switch to PDF (or similar) and don't pretend to be HTML.

I kind of feel like in the '90s, we screwed ourselves by having ugly defaults in the browsers. If no-CSS HTML files rendered more beautifully, maybe we would've avoided this mess.