The Life and Times of Cool

I totally agree about the creativity revolution. We need something like that. You raise a good point about "Web 2.0" dying out and spawing some maturity. That is a good thing for sure because the overly abused web 2.0 look felt immature after a while. Now I’d like to see some fresh creativity instead of the handful of web 2.0 design patterns that have plagued the web for the past year or so. Now that we, as an industry, are over that phase, it should separate the professionals from the amateurs. 

The crazy thing we need is a total reset.  HTML+CSS is the right direction, but backwards-compatible baby-steps are truly killing us.  We need to take what we’ve learned and re-create HTML as a purely semantic language and CSS with more power.

Nobody will be able to faithfully, dutifully argue that the 2.0 design trend isn’t expired, the fact that this posting exists is proof enough that the shift has already begun. But its a bit to lofty to say that we can’t create another design bubble, to call for a revolution. This mimicking is the very nature of the beast. Does anyone remember what was before the 2.0 design trend? Everyone made Flash sites and didn’t understand why or how to do it properly, and before that everything was "too much 2advaced" and before that, 45 degree angles. It’s happened before, and it will happen now. The web is also not alone in this problem, and I somewhat hesitate to call it a problem. In print design before it, in television, architecture, fashion and music, select innovators exist who drive the whole pack forward and the majority are just a part of the pack who mimic these new trends. Is it ideal? No. Can it be changed? No. Does it ruin the industry? No. Innovators don’t wait to see the new trend, don’t ask for it, they just do it, because that’s what they do. It would be great if we were all innovators, but it doesn’t work that way. (I’m certainly not as original as I wish I was, so please don’t misinterpret me.) There exist a large number of people who can interpret the current design trends and utilize them a successful and professional way in their own work, without having to be a slave to them. There also exist people who can’t survive without the direction being provided for them to copy, and there are yet those who have no real design sensibilities to utilize. Each of these groups plays their role and that’s as it should be. In the end, even with a lot of mimicing going on, we end up with an overall better design community. Another design trend is coming, you can see people breaking away from the current trends for some time now. This is a time to capitalize on that if you’ve been trying to do something different, because soon enough, there will be a new established trend and most of us will be very excited by that until we grow tired of that one too.

I always bothers me when a handful of people decide for the rest of any community what trends have died out and need to be replaced. The term "Web 2.0", I agree is a thing of the past, the signs are everywhere. Even when it was new people would still say it while doing sarcastic quote fingers. Gloss/Glass, reflections, gradients… these things were all here well before web 2.0, have they been overused of late? Of course however well done examples of these techniques can still be as fresh and exciting as the first time we saw them. I think we as designers do ourselves a huge diservice by declaring techniques that we’ve worked hard at developing to be obsolete just because so many of us have gone nuts in implementing them.I think the whole Web 2.0 thing was a wonderful shot in the arm to a design community that was still mired in tables and inaccessible code. It seems like overnight I went from hearing debates on why CSS sucks and why tables are still needed by designers to hearing a virtually united chorus of voices lauding CSS based design principles. This has a lot to do with the fact that the dawning of Web 2.0 showed a lot of designers that CSS wasn’t this evil thing that was going to suck the creativity out of their designs. Some very creative people started realizing that there were a lot of crazy things that CSS had all over tables and they broke the mold of (lets face it) some really dull design work that was comming out of the pro-css camp. Now, because there are gradient tutorials and web 2.0 pattern/stripe/reflection/button generators everywhere the backlash has come. It is a little elitist in my eyes. Almost like people saying, "Well, the newbies learned how to make our secret sauce, time to move on." That’s all fine by me, elitism in design is old hat but lets not leave scorched earth in our wake by declaring our own hard work as dead. This isn’t animated gif backgrounds, clip art, and blink tags we’re putting down here. It is realistic 3D shading, gloss effects, gradients, and tastefull patterns we’re declaring are over.  Maybe we should take a hint from print design and realize that everything in our arsenal is useful and can be used to great effect instead of being so anxious to find the big next new trend.

You’re spot on, Synthia, when you say it’s a case of "the newbies learned how to make our secret sauce, time to move on", but that’s progression (of any kind) for you.  If you’re on the leading edge and spend too long in a comfortable place such as enjoying the friuts of your hard-labour, the edge moves on without you and you’re left in the following majority again. If being leading edge matters to someone, they have to accept that there is a straight, inexorable choice between staying on the edge and allowing something to become comfortable. A choice between working hard forever, or working hard and then enjoying the benefits. You can’t have both unless everyone on the edge stops, simultaniously, ands waits for the followers. Progression is elitist by default, and only restricted progression can escape being elitist. That said, it works like that. Everyone has a choice, and there a pros and cons to both, you just have to find your place. If you’re on the edge, that is its own benefit and the disadvantage is the work required to stay there. If you’re a packrat you don’t have to work hard to find the pitfalls - you just read all about them - but the con is that nothing you do is particularly noteworthy. I prefer to sit somewhere between the two myself, enjoying a little of each pro and enduring a little of each con… but that could also be taken as more work than is required to get by with less kudos for being innovative. Meh :)

Fadtastic logo is so web 2.0 :D he he