Maria Grilo complains, and rightly so!, that the web has become homogenized and everything looks the same. In Brutalism Design is the Bad Influence We All Need, she bemoans the Apple / Google / Microsoft look and all it's descendents, the "clean design" and "cheerful animation," and points instead to websites that don't do any of that, but instead try very hard to maintain a look & feel that's distinct, different, and new.
Not only do I agree with Grilo, but... I have a confession to make. I have a folder on my laptop where I keep literally hundreds of screenshots of websites from the late 1990s through the mid-2000s.
Because back then, websites had flair. They had style. They had personality. The saddest examples I have are those that were once utterly gorgeous— and then the "new" CSS revolution came along and all the little fiddly hacks that made the website gorgeous didn't work anymore, or worse the site was completely written in Flash and no one wanted it to work anymore, and then the people running the website couldn't afford, or didn't know how, to retrofit the look of their site to standard CSS and modern HTML, so now there's a shitty Wordpress site where once loveliness reigned.
Look at these five examples, where the left is from before 2009, and the right is after.
The Viget one is especially disappointing because Viget used to be synonymous with good taste in web design. The Elbow Park one is saddest of all, with its gorgeous site replaced with a cheap Wordpress theme. The Morphix one at least has a background, but it's still a modern bog-standard asynchronous scrolling design.
Many of these are from design studios, and now their websites are all reassurances that they'll no longer be challenging or interesting. Instead, the promise is that, within the narrow confines of Microsoft / Google / Apple paradigm, they'll be able to "fit in" your corporate logo and identity. But it's a cold, sterile website, comfortably familiar yet distantly cold.
It's the opposite of Gruen Transfer. Maybe that's deliberate— it's damnably easy to get lost on the Internet and spend hours surfing for no good reason.
But it's surely boring. Remember texture? Gods, I remember texture. I remember when we could talk about web styles like "clean" and "grunge" and "metal" and it actually meant something. You can't talk about that anymore. Everything is corporate, templated, and built with Bootstrap and React. The other day I was working with a React-based Wordpress website. The CSS was four thousand lines of PCCS. React exists to make sure that wha you're looking at is congruent with what the system "knows." You absolutely do not need it for a static website, or for the Wordpress front-end. But it's hot, it's new. I'm good at React, but I work at a company that makes data-heavy products that demand lots of interaction. Your blog ain't that.
Not only do I agree with Grilo, but... I have a confession to make. I have a folder on my laptop where I keep literally hundreds of screenshots of websites from the late 1990s through the mid-2000s.
Because back then, websites had flair. They had style. They had personality. The saddest examples I have are those that were once utterly gorgeous— and then the "new" CSS revolution came along and all the little fiddly hacks that made the website gorgeous didn't work anymore, or worse the site was completely written in Flash and no one wanted it to work anymore, and then the people running the website couldn't afford, or didn't know how, to retrofit the look of their site to standard CSS and modern HTML, so now there's a shitty Wordpress site where once loveliness reigned.
Look at these five examples, where the left is from before 2009, and the right is after.
The Viget one is especially disappointing because Viget used to be synonymous with good taste in web design. The Elbow Park one is saddest of all, with its gorgeous site replaced with a cheap Wordpress theme. The Morphix one at least has a background, but it's still a modern bog-standard asynchronous scrolling design.
Many of these are from design studios, and now their websites are all reassurances that they'll no longer be challenging or interesting. Instead, the promise is that, within the narrow confines of Microsoft / Google / Apple paradigm, they'll be able to "fit in" your corporate logo and identity. But it's a cold, sterile website, comfortably familiar yet distantly cold.
It's the opposite of Gruen Transfer. Maybe that's deliberate— it's damnably easy to get lost on the Internet and spend hours surfing for no good reason.
But it's surely boring. Remember texture? Gods, I remember texture. I remember when we could talk about web styles like "clean" and "grunge" and "metal" and it actually meant something. You can't talk about that anymore. Everything is corporate, templated, and built with Bootstrap and React. The other day I was working with a React-based Wordpress website. The CSS was four thousand lines of PCCS. React exists to make sure that wha you're looking at is congruent with what the system "knows." You absolutely do not need it for a static website, or for the Wordpress front-end. But it's hot, it's new. I'm good at React, but I work at a company that makes data-heavy products that demand lots of interaction. Your blog ain't that.
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