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karpour | 6 months ago

This really makes clear how boring web design has become. 99% of websites use the same standard layout, there's almost nothing distinct or exciting about any of the designs. I remember web design being an art form, with books being printed with the best designs... I'd visit brand websites just to look at the design itself, even if I wasn't interested in what they were selling.

Of course not all is bad, but I'd love to see some creativity again, it seems like almost no one dares to break the norm anymore.

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codingdave|6 months ago

I like that we are stagnating. One of the things that took us away from the early content-focused days of the web is when every business had to get their brochures online, and every designer had to make their mark with how creative they could be. It vastly threw off the signal to noise ratio of web sites, and it delayed good UX for at least a decade because everyone re-invented menus and buttons on every web site.

Don't get me wrong. I like creativity. I am an artist, even have a degree in Fine Arts. But there are times to innovate, and there are times to just make things work. Web UX needs to just work.

shinycode|6 months ago

Yeah 90% of websites are just informative … why would they need to be creative ?

esseph|6 months ago

There was some F1 website posted on here the other day and it was absolutely beautiful, but a bit quirky to use in practice.

Ton of people complained, they hated it!

That's why everything is fucking boring, because everybody tries to cater to the average.

cheschire|6 months ago

I’m so happy I was not the only person to notice that.

A bit quirky is exactly how I would have described it and once I accepted scrolling one direction would move the page wherever the designer wanted, I was fine.

I guess we found all the kids at Ender’s battle school that couldn’t imagine the enemy’s gate as “down”.

owlninja|6 months ago

I do wonder how HN specific this is? Every site that has a quirky design or attempts something new gets absolutely blasted by surly people. But then someone posts a funny GeoCities style bootstrap theme and everyone goes on about how they miss when sites had a quirky touch?

bookofjoe|6 months ago

I tried really hard to like that F1 website but just couldn't do it: terrible experience.

verdverm|6 months ago

From the well aged book "Don't Make Me Think", people read the web differently than books. Almost always they are there to find information or get something accomplished, not for aesthetics or pleasure (though social media has likely skewed this since it's penning)

This is why consistent UX beats out cleaver design (churn)