molly.com
Thursday 16 March 2006
pMachine Results: And the winners are…
The pMachine Shootout has concluded, with three first-place winners in the categories of commercial, personal, and ee (Expression Engine) core:
- Commercial 1st Place: AIGA Richmond, designer Phillip Hertzler
- Personal 1st Place: Veerle’s Blog, designer Veerle Pieters
- Core 1st Place: BananaBits, designer Louis Lopez
Be sure to read more about the personal and business benefits of pMachine’s Expression Engine and take a look at all the shootout design entries.
It was a really tough contest to judge. I wish I could say that was because the designs were so fresh and innovative that choosing winners was tough, but unfortunately I cannot say that. It was tough to judge because it was painfully obvious which designs stood out above the rest, and finding any designs beyond a handful that really showed some independent thinking was frustrating.
It’s an interesting discussion that my post-SXSW and still-on-the-road brain wants to take a bit further after some rest.
For now, I wonder what can we do to inspire Web designers to push beyond what’s been the design trends since the CSS Zen Garden emerged? I recognized a Zen Garden design in nearly every single entry, and it’s as though very few designers are progressing beyond that point with their CSS designs. Why is this, and how can we push innovation in Web design forward?
Filed under: web design and development
Posted by: Molly | 05:44 | Comments (16)
Interesting question. I’m sure there are some (many) that will claim that the growing popularity of user-centered design is giving rise to some immutable ‘facts’ of web design; this works best here, that goes there, clicking on this does that, etc, etc. How much innovation can you stand before it becomes “pretty but unusable” because it breaks so many ‘rules’?
*looks through the winners and doesn’t see /that/ site*
I knew I should have tracked you down and dropped some.. er… hints
But I do think all the winners look good.
As for pushing web design beyond where we seem to have settled in the last year I’m not sure the answer, I think its part tools, part browsers and part a simple need for new blood.
Or maybe someone just needs to write an article about how things are boring and start a whole new cycle of creativity.
SXSW namedropping
I’ve been jotting down a partial list of the people I’ve been meeting (some old friends, some for the first time) in the halls and at the parties here in Austin. I’m sure I’m forgetting various cool somebodies and I’ll upd…
Growth in many things, including both design and sciences, seem to run in two cycles: a discovery cycle wherein everything is being discovered, everything is new, and everything’s worth trying; and a digestion cycle, where most things have been tried, and people settle on the “best practices” that suit the nature of whatever it is they’re working on.
The CSS Zen Garden was realized in a discovery cycle, and spawned many great looks and ideas in design. It’s settled into a digestion phase, where people are now going through the garden and picking out the biggest blooms and ripest vegetables. It can’t be helped; it’s the nature of the beast.
To restart discovery, to inspire people to look for new solutions to design problems, we first need a new problem. Personally, I’d like a better way to sell good design to those “professional designers” whose main page designs consist of five (?!) stylesheets and tables nested ten (!!?!!) levels deep, and who produce pages that take seconds to load at corporate intranet speeds. But that’s a story for another time.
“I recognized a Zen Garden design in nearly every single entry, and it’s as though very few designers are progressing beyond that point with their CSS designs. Why is this, and how can we push innovation in Web design forward?”
Molly, I have some ideas. For one thing, we could promote more liquid and elastic design. It’s a totally different ballfield, and requires a lot of new thinking to solve much more complex problems. It’s something I’ve been talking about a lot, and I’ve seen some very creative solutions (so I’ve archived them too: http://www.cssliquid.com).
Another thing is to push the use of new CSS 3 techniques, things that are being implemented in Safari/Mozilla/Opera, maybe some SVG too. IE 7 will support a lot of cool stuff too and it would be great to see designers playing with the stuff now.
Also, there’s unobtrusive Javascript techniques (like Lightbox) which are really making strides in making more attractive, “fun” web sites without killing accessibility.
I guess I just want to see designers break away from the same CSS 2, fixed width, background image, trend-following designs. It will take time but there are definitely some innovative designs out there right now.
This is a problem, but it always was a problem. Even back in the day of the CSS Garden. Many of the submitted gardens looked alike, and design wise many of the gardenz are not that advanced. The techniques used often are but not the design. I’ve heard many designers complain that the CSS Zen Garden is often mistakenly concidered to be the cutting edge of design. I personally share that view. It was certainly cutting edge in front-end development, at the time.
CSS and tools for creating websites are largely irrelavant in the design proccess. Awareness is key in design but that in of itself doesn’t lead to good design. For innovation and creativity we may need to look to designers for that next wave. Front-end development like that found on the CSS Zen Garden hasn’t pushed design that far. It wasn’t meant to. It shined in achieving it’s goal to showcase CSS.
Two thoughts on this.
1. Why do we need further innovation? Don’t we have designs that meet user needs already? There is a possibility of being over-prescriptive, even with design.
2. Innovation will happen when it’s needed. CSS3 will probably push a lot of people further than they can see right now. It’s the nature of the beast.
Today CSS zen garden, tomorrow the world of open source design… OS designs are taking over the blog theme world already, and the step to commercial usage is very, very short. Innovative? Not really. Simple and useful? Definitely.
I couldn’t agree more with Veerle’s blog being a winner. I just can’t get enough of it. She’s a genius.
Layout Complete Announced at MIX06
Thursday, March 23rd and I am sitting in the airport heading home from MIX06. It was a great conference…
A designer friend of mine calls himself a magpie, he loves everything that he sees that is shiny and will reuse it again and again.
Some design principles are tried and true. Others are the fad of the year or two years.
When I look at the websites out and about, it is not the hot shot designers that wow me, but many of the unknown zines put up for fun and updated infrequently, as many of them are not designing for props but for their own tastes.
Maybe if more of us were to design our sites for our personal tastes and push that taste, rather than trying to keep up with the Gardeners, there would be more innovative design.
;o)
[...] There’s something bubbling in the web design pot. EE’s $15,000 shootout led Molly to bemoan the lack of originality in web design these days. She asked what might inspire a new renaissance, bigger and better than the one created by the CSS Zen Garden. [...]
Thanks so much.
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