Retiring Design Techniques

In the world of design there will always be traditional techniques that endure. And the principles for good design while learned require creative insight and inspiration and talent for application.  Said another way, one can learn to be a design critic but not everyone can be a designer. Or at the least not everyone will become a good designer.

At the minimum learning the basic principles of skilled design starts with learning about layout and the color wheel.  Next up you learn about presentation in terms of composition, contrast and perspective. And when it comes to print and web you then begin to dive into the details surrounding typography and different philosophies on web pagination. Throwing all of the usual suspects into a web page (colors, tables, tags, color, fonts, content, etc.) makes you no more of a designer than tossing all of the ingredients for a meal into a blender makes you a chef!

Over the years the one mystery that I find interesting is the fine line between an enduring traditional design technique and a trendy implementation that ends up being a fad more-or-less. In any practice, new standards emerge all of the time.  The challenge is adopting an emerging standard and not just absorbing a fad-style trend.  If you want to have a portfolio that continues to promote your work then you need to be heavy on enduring design and lighter on trendy.

Don’t misunderstand me. Fads sell! Equally as important, a corporate client who is suckered into constantly reworking a trendy web presence will surely keep you employed for a very long time. Chasing trends for a client is very lucrative.  But you run the risk of wearing out their budget, their patience as well as their customers if you are completely re-trending their presence every six months.

And now we are at the point of this blog post: putting to rest some trends that may not make it as new design standards.

First up, rounded corners on content are the jeans hemline of the web design world. In wasn’t too many years ago that we tight-rolled our jeans.  A couple decades before that everyone was wearing bell bottom jeans. One thing is certain: you have to hem the ankle of jeans.  That would be a standard.  How big the opening is would be all about trends. The same goes for rounded corners in web design.  Just a few years ago designers were implementing a 30+ pixel radius on design corners.  While rounded corners are beginning to feel like the new timeless, be aware that larger rounded corners need to be retired as the rounded trend is less than a 20 pixel radius.  In reality, it is all about ratio and context.  The key here is to think subtle and organic.  It is a design element and not the main character in the show.

Cut corners is the next trend that may need to go away. The same rule applied to the size of rounded corners general applied to the size of the cut.  The trouble with cut corners is that cut corners literally call too much attention to themselves. Unless you are trying to achieve a pixelated look, cut corners are like a woman with too much makeup on.  While I see this technique trending in certain industries (ie. tech hardware manufacturers) I believe it might be a slightly overstated technique.

Drop shadow is the go to effect for people without an imagination.  Shadows are very organic and often viewed within life as we know it, but seldom are they applied to evoke an organic reality.  They simply imply depth in what would otherwise be a very two dimensional web page. I don’t think drop shadows will go away soon, but my hope is that the quality of shadows (shadows contain color and are not simply black to white gradients) and their use contain more thought that simply a cheap treatment on a boring rectangular image.

Symmetrical square bullets didn’t live too long. You would often see this denoting the title of a page or at the start of a section header. I believe this is a throwback to art included in a Microsoft Office product used to create a corporate letterhead, but I can’t verify that. The one redeeming element of the square bullets is the simplicity and cleanness of it.  The trouble is that it nearly drives an aesthetic into a very boring and uncreative state. I think it is time to retire the square bullets.

Not all vertical gradients are ready to be retired.  In fact, not unlike shadows, gradients appear all over the place in regular life.  It is the unnatural low contrast perfectly vertical presentation of a gradient that should be retired. To breathe a little life into your vertical gradients, simply incorporate them into a larger aesthetic rather than make it the predominant focal style of a design.

Finally, I would like to see the creative world retire it’s over obsessive use of the orange accent color. Never before has the design world, hunters and the Air Force had so much in common! Orange accents do not suddenly transform an otherwise monochromatic design into art. Good design is all about integrating the aesthetic. Quality web design is not an effort to paint someone’s web browser. I have noticed that we are coming to the other side of this trend and it is about time. Companies who have buddied up to orange imagining that it evokes an association with creativity had better begin to rethink their color scheme before they start looking like yesterday’s trend.  And that isn’t a good place to be found.