I politely implore designers to evolve and make websites creative again. There has to be a way. The current meta is weak.

Hello guys

More and more often I see people showing nostalgia for older design eras, talking about how buildings, street furniture, logos… How everything had more feeling back then.

The same goes for user interface design: lots of viral posts about those 2000s XP music players that looked like spaceships, those old “metallic” messy flash game websites, those old “skeuomorphic” web applications.

People miss that creativity.

Yet today’s websites continue to use the same design trends: flat design, hero, maps, icons and colorful buttons.

I know what you’re going to say: it’s modern, fast, efficient, easy to use, responsive and people are used to it.
In short: it is the best paradigm for SEO and conversion.

I understand that.

But come on… Should design just be about earning more customers and sales?

It’s not even modern anymore: that sheet was barely cool in 2014 and hasn’t evolved since.

I couldn’t even find any data to support the supposed superiority of those standard websites in marketing compared to more creative websites (there’s nothing creative to compare them to anyway).

So people keep making these just… because? Participating in a huge echo chamber, without actual evidence that it makes them more successful.

Chilling on a random website used to be a pleasure.
A video game web page that looked like an alien bunker was part of the experience. It felt good and it didn’t stop us from using it efficiently.

Now, using a website consists of accelerating information to action, without any sense of joy.
New websites are basically modern market hits.
Perhaps treating the visitor like a vulgar cow that needs to be milked as quickly as possible will fail to foster a solid relationship between him and the brand.

Yeah, I know…people have no attention spans these days. However, is it the designer’s responsibility?
You wouldn’t see novelists using pink, bold fonts and fun icons to keep the reader reading, would you? Unless they’re targeting toddlers.

Maybe websites should stop trying to please everyone’s chimpanzee brain.
Maybe websites should be okay with less “conversion” while providing a more enjoyable experience for the real people who stay reading for more than 2 minutes.

So please, fellow designers, as an Internet user I speak for millions: we demand a revolution.

Please tell us there is a way to revive the Internet, make it evolve and make it a fun and creative place again.

There must be a way…

We have always found a way…

When you consider that the internet is perfect as it is, that the purpose of a website is just reassurance, urgency and quick action with a minimal amount of scannable text…
Use templates? It won’t make any difference at this point.

Better idea: stop designing anything. Let the developers do it: accessible bootstrap navigation, a few bold sans-serif sentences on a white background to explain the most important things, images to show it off, and whatever random text you need for Google to notice. It will be enough.

Because I can guarantee you that we’ve never clicked on an interesting link because “uuughh no parallax?! No crazy JavaScript animation?! No nice gradient?!” so if you want to strive for efficacy, really do it.

And if you all decide to keep that energy of “efficiency standardized web design”, good luck surviving as a profession, in a world of hegemonic social networks, LLM chats and one-prompt site generators.

I mean, if you keep designing robot websites, robots will probably do a better job than you.

However, if you go back to designing humane websites…

Don’t be afraid…it will be fine.

Want to see how the major European cities are classified? Old, dusty, smelly city centers surrounded by beautiful and clean buildings.

Yet the city centers are FULL, because tourists and citizens would rather shop in those old, small, imperfect but charming streets than in some impersonal shopping center built with glass and metal.

Perhaps there is something to meditate on here.