Brendan Dawes
The Art of Form and Code

Web designers, stop looking at web design

The other day I was adding some podcasts to the wonderful huffduffer, a service that allows you queue podcasts up for listening later. I tagged my stuff up as "design" and then whilst on the site itself I thought I'd click on the design tag.

My heart sank.

Inside the design tag was pretty much all podcasts about HTML, CSS, Jquery etc etc. I wanted to find inspiring stuff about design; all kinds of design not just web design. In fact that's the last thing I wanted to listen to.

This isn't a fault of huffduffer of course, but made me think that many so called web designers seem to spend a lot of time looking at other web design. Personally I find it much more inspirational looking at anything but web design. I'd rather read about someone like Cecil Balmond building impossible things than listen to yet another Opinion about how to build bloody websites.

Have you also noticed that when a website is critiqued by your peers no one ever mentions the content. Ever. They talk about the plumbing. It's like doing a book review but only talking about the binding and the printing technique.

So today, stop looking at web design. In fact stop being a "web" designer and be a designer instead.