All projects: Gel, Jobs, Good Todo, Games, Uncle Mark, Blog, Bit Literacy
All projects: Gel, Jobs, Good Todo, Games, Uncle Mark, Blog, Bit Literacy
Best-of, Bit Literacy, Broken, Column Archive, Customer Experience, Fun Stuff, Gel, Interviews, Quick Posts
But maybe the tragic part is that the big name designers get away with not looking web 2.0 because they are big names already.
I respectfully disagree.
The "Web 2.0" design aesthetic can be used successfully as long as it's done within reason. I'm working on a web app UI for a client who wants to build a "consumer friendly" version of their previously commercial-only product that was mostly used by doctors, hospitals, etc. The UI for this app was very cold, sterile and hard to use. Consumers were not responding to it at all.
My solution was to apply some (but not all) of the Web 2.0 design aesthetic to a new UI and set of templates. We just got back from preliminary user testing and the consumers overwhelmingly approved of the new UI because it was "friendly" to them, had more contrasting colors, etc.
If I had gone with a more conventional UI, the target users (consumers) would not react to it the same way and the UI design would have been seen as a failure.
Sometimes you have to give your users what they want and right now what they want is "Web 2.0-looking" sites and applications.
Cute how he used Web 2.0 buttons to close the presentation!
My summary: If everything is designed to look like the new Web 2.0 look, then that look isn’t going to be new for long, nothing will stand out from anything else, and everything will have to be updated very soon.
While this is a relatively mild design complaint, check out the video on their website: makemylogobiggercream.com
Boy can I relate. I can't tell you the number of times some perfectly brilliant person (without design skills, however) has really, really wanted to put their thumbprint on a design we've developed.
The problem is the ideas are so often bad design. And design, like any other discipline, has basic rules you have to follow. If the rules aren’t followed, it’s broke.
The weird thing is I don’t think anyone would feel as comfortable walking over to a developer to ask for some teeny, tiny, inconsequential (or worse horribly bad) change to the code. Yet almost everyone feels comfortable asking a designer to change a color, the layout, or to make something bigger and brighter.
The question is why are people more comfortable helping designers design than they are helping developers code? Assuming the designer is good, why don’t people let the design experts design?
Is it because everyone colored with crayons in the first grade? Do we believe everyone has this innate skill? Is there no such thing as a design expert?