Some Random Dude

A ran across an interesting article, Where Did My Beautiful Internet Go?, a couple days ago on one person’s thoughts the direction the internet is going. With RSS, syndication and the rise of the blog, the author feels that the visual design and originality of the internet as a whole has taken a hit. Honestly, it is hard to argue with this preface if one looks strictly from a visual standpoint. Nonetheless, I feel the quality of design as a whole on the web is at an all-time high with the future looking even more promising. The argument really comes down to whether you think of design strictly from a visual standpoint or consider it to be a collection of the entire experience. With myself leaning greatly to the latter, I look at the current trend on the web as good. We cannot put the usability and accessibility of information aside from this debate – they are a crucial piece of design on the web, if not the most important.

Sure, I have a bone or two to pick with certain visual design styles, and the lack of visual originality with many sites, most especially blogs. However, many of the root-caused for those very issues have allowed for an unprecedented increase in user-experience design and accessibility. The rise of the blog and the general theory behind Web 2.0 has allowed the user and other sites to have greater access to content – allowing for a richer experience. Usability and web standards have definitely stifled visual creativity at times, but the movement is responsible for a much accessible and compatible internet. A site can be absolutely visually stunning, but if the public cannot easily access the information or interact with it, the design failed.

With information becoming more modular with every passing day, we are going to have to get comfortable with letting go of controlling how our content always looks. We need accept the fact that (many) people prefer to access data from an RSS reader or a web aggregator. While one may be of the opinion that certain content looks more appealing under a certain strict visual style, imposing those beliefs onto the audience is not the job of a designer nor is it responsible. Time would be better spent working with those technologies to make the content look its absolute best under all circumstances. Fighting this is useless, content and information is only going to become more free.

Design, especially on the internet, is a balancing act. Communication and aesthetics can, at times, conflict with each other which forces compromise. At this moment on the web, communication has taken the higher priority – which probably has to do with the fact that it was so neglected in the early years of design on the web. What we are seeing now is a natural return to balance. Honestly, this is a good thing.

So, our ‘beautiful internet’ is still here and thriving, it is just becoming beautiful in an entirely different way.

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