Trevor Gerzen's Blog

Noah Stokes | Es Bueno: Where has all the soul gone?

I mentioned it today in a tweet:
“I feel like responsive design has sucked the soul out of website design. Everything is boxes and grids.

I recently mocked something up and thought it was pretty good. Saw someone else post their redesign and realized that mine was so similar to theirs it bothered me. It was most obviously not that either of us had blatantly plagiarized the other, but it was due to the fact that we both subscribe to the same influences.

By that I just mean that cultures exist because of similarities, but change comes from trying something new or possibly different. I don’t think all of this exploration and refinement into responsive web design is anything new or bad in that respect.

There is a trend happening. One thing about that trend that I will say I like is that it is a trend that focuses on simplified layout. A trend that to me is somewhat of the opposite side of the pendulum swing from the Flash-tastic 90s-early 2000s that wanted everything to be over the top.

Brian Hoff mentioned SuperFriendly’s new design over at MadeCo. When I realized that I didn’t get all stretchy with my browser when I first looked at that site a light bulb went off.

Daniel Mall and his team won.

They made something that didn’t even occur to me that it would be responsive. It had unique graphics, familiar layout, but it had a definite feeling that it conveyed. Not boring at all. I didn’t care about how they made it all snappy. I liked looking at the content so much I forgot about all that other stuff.

I see that as a prime example of what Noah is talking about. Make an awesome experience that the user becomes involved with and they won’t even know there is a UI. Plus, they’ll have fun! How about that for a website?!