Big question: how does web design need to improve?

I think the biggest improvements come in from designers’ better understanding of CMSs. Websites will improve in quality as they better understand how they work, the opportunities they present and the limitations they impose. Those that have already done this produce what are often the most exciting and talked about sites on the web. And it always appears that at the core of this is a full embracing of the CMS. Designers have to stop thinking that CMSs are the domain of the developers and embrace them as critical parts of the design process.

Web design and development is a young and immature industry. It is bound by facile and superficial questions, such as should a web specification have a logo, and is HTML5 'ready' yet. These are questions that bewilder an amateur, a hobbyist; yet professionals with years of experience get sucked into these black-holes of triviality everyday. It's time for us to evolve and move forward in understanding the creative opportunities this incredible technology gives us to channel our endeavours into making the web everything that it can and should be. Web design must grow-up.

I would describe it this way: Fixed-width design isn't going away because it's easy. It's like playing the game Connect Four versus playing Twister. One is simple and straightforward, the other multivariate, so much so that you can't really formulate a one-size-fits-all strategy. Which isn't to say people shouldn't endeavour to do responsive sites, just that they can't expect the heavy lifting to be done for them. That is, until we arrive at a decent framework approach – I haven't seen it yet.

As practitioners we need to do more to improve the quality of our craft and raise the profile of our industry. This means constantly striving to produce the best work possible and turning down projects that require us to compromise on quality. This means increasing the standard of design education in schools as well as focusing on our own continual development. We need to realise that complex problems require multi-disciplinary teams and move away from the notion of the savant designer. Sure these people exist, but finding somebody who can plan, design code and execute to the highest level is as rare as hens teeth. Instead we need to understand that our industry is both deep and broad, and treat it with the level of skill and respect it deserves. Web design is the new architecture, so we need to start treating it as such.

In this industry, those of us who work with clients (agencies, freelancers—however we choose to identify ourselves) have lost our backbone, and we desperately need to find it again. Clients trust us to do the right thing, to make the best choices on their behalf, yet too frequently I hear people say, “Well, that's what the client wanted” or “Hey, it's their money: we just do what they tell us” with regards to a poorly executed design.

It's our responsibility to guide our clients away from ill-advised, incorrect, or just plain bad decisions. We're virtual product designers, and as such we cannot afford to fall victim to the same misguided please-the-client-at-all-costs disease that has plagued advertising and other creative industries for decades. We must teach ourselves how to stand up for what we know is in the best interests of the people who use what we create—we have no one to blame but ourselves for the problems people encounter otherwise.

I've seen users interacting with both sites. Users like the style. We as professionals might see them as naive, garish and cheap but these are the very elements of the design users appreciate. Over-designed equals expensive. Less design equals better value. We need to take a step back from our designs and think, ‘Have we gone too far? Does the design convey the right message?’, especially as we are working in a world where 'value' is important right now.

I think that, as an industry, we still need to work towards establishing best practices and getting the word out about them. For all of the knowledge we have about disseminating information, we're still not doing a great job of getting everyone on the same page (or at least getting folks to argue about what that page is). We've created so many (some might argue too many) resources for web designers and the barrier to creating more is so low that it has become a signal vs. noise issue. There are so many approaches and so many recommendations that it's hard to know what is actually a best practice. There are a few heavily tech-reviewed ‘authorities’ such as A List Apart, but there are thousands of forums, blogs, and Q&A sites out there with hundreds of ‘how do I do this?’ questions being asked every day.

Don't get me wrong, I think it's great to have vibrant discussion and dissenting opinions, but I think we ultimately need to reach a consensus on the bigger picture stuff as we've seen in other industries (construction, television production, journalism etc). Standards – especially those beyond the technical specifications offered by the W3C and others – are incredibly important for the maturity of our industry.

There are many missed opportunities in the designs I see. By taking advantage of the technology, their creators could have significantly enhanced the usability of their creation. For our new fragmented world to be filled with beautiful, usable interfaces across a multitude of platforms, designers need to ensure they partner effectively with developers in order to produce the very best in both design and technology.

We web designers need to moderate our use of all the latest CSS and JavaScript gimmicks or develop a better understanding of when to use certain tricks and the reasoning behind them. I see so many designers throwing in box shadows and text shadows and animations and transforms just because they can, often without any real thought as to why those effects are being employed. There's nothing wrong with any of them — and I'm very much in favour of using the latest tools available to us to make the web a more beautiful place — but we must remember that there are appropriate and inappropriate uses for everything.

I'd like to see more evidence of storytelling in design. It seems like an ideal partnership but one that isn't always clear how to execute. Stories can be told through icons, wayfinding systems, colours, brands and of course the copy. Bringing these elements together to tell a coherent and effective story is the aim but with storytelling very much part of the process from day one and not an afterthought.

To stop being calling 'web design'.

The term 'web design' limits its vision. To many, 'design' simply means the visual look and feel. They thinks its like Lawrence Llewellyn-Bowen coming in to decorate a house! In digital this is only a tiny part of what some people call 'web design'. It incorporates a wide array of areas including strategy, creative, IA, usability and content strategies. And we're no longer just talking about the web – an increasingly large proportion is app based. So isn’t it time to call it something more apt and begin to change people's perceptions?

I still believe a significant amount of mainstream web design tends to focus more on niche and function, rather than giving due attention to design fundamentals. It's not a fluke that many emerging projects from high-end firms are returning to the study of core philosophies like line, form and composition. I believe these projects are stunning and rare due to the common disregard of traditional principles in modern interactive environments. It is no longer good enough to merely produce a slick, glossy template with some lighting effects. Good web designers are thinking more and more like print designers, realising that, just like any good piece of fine art, the true interactive experience is one of visual balance.

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The Creative Bloq team is made up of a group of design fans, and has changed and evolved since Creative Bloq began back in 2012. The current website team consists of eight full-time members of staff: Editor Georgia Coggan, Deputy Editor Rosie Hilder, Ecommerce Editor Beren Neale, Senior News Editor Daniel Piper, Editor, Digital Art and 3D Ian Dean, Tech Reviews Editor Erlingur Einarsson and Ecommerce Writer Beth Nicholls and Staff Writer Natalie Fear, as well as a roster of freelancers from around the world. The 3D World and ImagineFX magazine teams also pitch in, ensuring that content from 3D World and ImagineFX is represented on Creative Bloq.

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