Watching online design “mature”.
January 23rd, 2010We are an industrial design agency, but at notion we believe strongly in the cross pollination of disciplines, and more importantly that great design really happens when design disciplines converge. For this reason our team spans various creative disciplines. The result is a journal which one minute discusses the process of teaching undergraduate Industrial Design modules, and then this….
To date, you could argue that design for the internet has been reactive, and heavily influenced by whatever technology was in fashion at any given moment.
Bloated html sites came and went. By some strange coalescence of technologies html “tables” were married to heavy, grid-like JPG layouts. Perhaps it was the direct result of graphic design “owning” what happened online for the first few years of professional web design practice. The result was heavy, and uninspiring (and no excuses, we were involved).
Imagine scanning a brochure and uploading it as your website. This is what it felt like.
Crossing over this period was the beginning of flash. Imagine animating your uploaded brochure for little reason, and trying to download it on a 24 K dialup connection. Flash sites proliferated across the internet, at a time when very few people actually had the capacity to view them. Looking back it feels as though we weren’t really sure about why anyone was using flash, there certainly wasn’t the semblance of smooth integration with static websites of the time.
Then, in a knee jerk reaction, came Web 2.0.
Reject flash, reject tables, reject anything that doesn’t conform to web standards, reject richness, reject anything that even hinted at being superfluous. Adopt reflections, adopt drop-shadows, adopt AJAX, adopt rounded corners. The sea change in what was in-vogue online happened in just a few months. Sometimes it made sense and a lot of times it was a drag and drop style. Nonetheless as motion began to creep back into these sites I believe things really began to fall into place. Suddenly the technologies were combining with design principles (and faster connections) to deliver a new kind of online experience.
Combining the technical knowledge gained in the early, heady days of the web boom, with the staunch rejection of all things superfluous and appreciation of UI that came as a result of Web 2.0 has brought us to a point where the online experience is now truly maturing.
Over the past few days I have come across several sites that reaffirm this belief. Sites that don’t act like sites, they act like applications. Sites that contain many different technologies, but where not once do you notice where one ends and the next begins. Sites that deliver the type of interface normally associated with standalone operating systems.