Web Design 3.0: When Your Web Design Matters
I think that there is much to learn from &#x27;electronic music&#x27;. This differed from what came before in the way that the web differed from print. With early techno music you could press a few buttons on a gadget box and it would play the beat for you, on top of this you could sample things and mix them in. Before that drummers had to actually keep time and singers had to hit their notes.<p>Then computers came along. Some of the early techno pioneers didn&#x27;t have a clue how to use a computer. They were stuck using the early electronic gadgets and the workflow that went with it.<p>Then a new generation came along that could use the computers and could do everything on an Apple laptop without having to have a bedroom full of turntables, forests of wires, keyboards, samplers and drum machines.<p>The older guys stuck with the original tools for &#x27;electronic music&#x27; still linger around but the tools for the job have changed. Had they been born a generation later with the same passion for music they would have gone straight to the computer stage.<p>Getting back to web development, I think we have something similar going on. A generation of web designers got used to developing with the desktop publishing tools and static mockups in PDF form. Responsive design for mobile for them was just a doubling of their workload using these same methods. They are very much stuck on things like &#x27;pixel sizes&#x27; and much else that doesn&#x27;t really relate to how it is done.<p>I think that future designers will work very differently, essentially thinking in terms of what can be done to content instead of placeholder copy with CSS, SVG and javascript animation.<p>The reason we are not there yet is pretty much the same as it was with music, you need a new generation to come along to think in terms of the new ways of working.<p>Right now it seems that the website builder services such as Squarespace are of great appeal to people. A few years ago a freelance designer could build a website for a local business with Wordpress but now they use Squarespace. The bloat does not matter to them. It looks good and who cares if it is not using CSS grid?<p>At the other end of the spectrum, sizeable businesses with web development teams are stuck like the early electronic music artists are. They have a visual design process, the &#x27;agile&#x27; religion and plenty of excuses for not using CSS grid or even the full vocabulary of HTML5 elements one would use if taking a content driven design path.<p>I am looking forward to the changes that are likely to happen as the new generation gain more confidence and demonstrate better, quicker results by using better HTML5 and the full range of CSS grid. I can&#x27;t see website builder services such as Squarespace being able to keep people happy with bloated web pages forever and, when it becomes possible to get results with native HTML5&#x2F;CSS without having a behemoth of a dev team, there should be design progress.