4/27/2005 16:50

My friend Brandon has been designing web sites for many years, we met doing a bunch of work together on web sites five years ago. He and I were talking today, and he said something that was really interesting to me. He said he's noticing a big shift in the way designers are creating sites. When I asked him what the most noticable change in web design was, it was funny to hear him say "Kids have grown up with big screens."

It used to be that web sites were optimized to accommodate 800 x 600 screens (for laptops). (Well, it used to be that "green" screens were then norm, and that orange type was a novelty... but that was the time of the 300 baud modems, and I digress.) Apparently now, the trend is to create "print-like" environments where there are beautiful images at the top of the page that will sometimes fill a browser window half full.

Another change is the concept of first level, second level and third level pages. They're disappearing. No more do you find the drastic design differences as you navigate through web properties. As we talked about this, Brandon remarked that he's starting to see more and more business and portfolio sites that look more like blogs than the more familiar, traditional sites.

Another shift

When I told Tara about this shift, she noted that she's seen more traditional journalism sites - like cnet.com - with trackback links on their stories. They might not be inviting comments (yet!) on their own sites, but they can track the resulting discussions.

When you think about the ripple effects of technology - big screens and blogging, for example - on design, it's really pretty fun to watch them unfold.

I wonder how our brains will evolve to map the changes?

Posted by at April 27, 2005 4:50 PM

Comments

Kevin email -

[[[ ART ]]]

Where is Brandon noticing these shifts take place? I look critically at just about every web design that I see and I can't say that I've noticed a shift to page-dominating art.

Maybe I'm just spending time on information or e-comm related sites, but even when I hit culture-driven sites -- New York Public Library or National Geographic -- I'm not seeing this.

That's probably great designers know that it's dangerous to hit your visitors with an inaccessible wall of graphic content when they come to a site. I'd suggest that if this really IS a growing trend, that it'll be shortlived, much like the Flash splash pages of the late 1990s and early 2000s. Remember how effective those were?

[[[ BLOGS ]]]

The blogging trend is pretty straightforward: more sites look like blogs because that's exactly what they are. It's a real simple way to publish. But it's going to be a while before businesses that have blog sites learn how to use the technology effectively. There are still a thousand thousand websites that haven't figured out how to be useful, effective resources for people, let alone have the capability to publish new content at the twinge of a synapse.

Janet email - www.marqui.com

Hey Kevin, thanks for the insights. I would love to facilitate a discussion among designers as to trends - IF any - in the web design industry.

I thought Brandon's insights were interesting, but didn't push to further define where he was seeing the change. Will it be short-lived? (I still shudder when I hit a Flash splash page!)

Kevin email -

I'd really like a discussion too. It's easy to talk about design trends in broad terms, but different industries obviously have different design requirements, don't they?

I guess my comments come out the whole 'usability' issue. And I'm not even sure who has the final word on that anymore -- Jakob Nielson seems so trite. I know that there's a usability org, VanUE, in Vancouver (where are you?), but I'm too afraid to go because of the whole Groucho Marx principle: I wouldn't want to belong to a club that would have people like me as a member.

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