Designers aren't ruining the web because they want it to look good, they're ruining the web because they aren't clear on how to do it.
As the author points out, it's not an issue of bandwidth so much as an issue of visual clutter and processor power—although watching a page try to make calls to a dozen separate web services before it will finish loading and let me interact with it smoothly is certainly frustrating. That's not necessarily the designer's fault, though, everyone shares the blame there.
No, the problem is that graphic designers generally approach web pages as if they were designing for print or television.
After many years working in large agencies in New York, I can count on one hand the number of "creatives" who knew any more about the technologies that make up the web than a little basic HTML 1.0, at best.
I started my career as a print designer in the 1990s. Designing for books and magazines, you had to understand your medium. Any print designer worth their salt regularly went on press checks, knew the difference between a sheet-fed litho and a web-fed offset press, how linescreens related to dpi measurements, how trapping worked, drum vs. flatbed scanning, all that.
Compare that to graphic designers for the web, who in my experience have little to no understanding of how a browser renders code, or how different services communicate.
The best graphic designers aren't trying to be programmers, but they know the medium they're working in, and they don't try to force it to be something it's not.
Beauty, usability, and performance aren't mutually exclusive concepts on the web. It's just that most clients only care about the first one (until the site has already launched), and most designers don't have enough knowledge of the second two.
Completely agree, just to add a few of my points...
Designers are also ruining the web because they are removing choice in how I view content.
HTML pages used to be designed such that they were a standard markup language. Thus I could change the settings of my browser if I preferred a dark background with light text. Now in the land of everything is a DIV and CSS is used to recreate the markup language, this is no longer possible -- at least not in a generic way. Not to mention it breaks browsing in a completely cross platform way (lynx, small screened devices, screen readers, etc.); you designer, will always forget at least one. And don't get me started on sites that do not load the content without javascript.
My preference would be that designers accepted the constraints of HTML. They are more than welcome to use CSS to offer my browser suggestions to how it should be rendered, but as the viewer, the final choice would be to me. If you MUST make the layout fit some exact format, switch to PDF (or similar) and don't pretend to be HTML.
I kind of feel like in the '90s, we screwed ourselves by having ugly defaults in the browsers. If no-CSS HTML files rendered more beautifully, maybe we would've avoided this mess.
"Beauty, usability, and performance aren't mutually exclusive concepts on the web. It's just that most clients only care about the first one (until the site has already launched), and most designers don't have enough knowledge of the second two."
And clients are usually only qualified to care about the first trait.
There's a mis-match between the terms "well-designed" and "looks beautiful." I find many sites that look gorgeous, but I can't find what I want, and can't make them do what I need. So I leave. They fail the basic requirement that they meet the needs of me, a potential customer.
But I'm also finding increasingly that I feel like my face is being pushed through mush. Everything seems soft, or rounded, or pastel, or otherwise character-free. This button is blended, that panel is graduated. It's all free of any kind of personality.
It's mush.
And so many times it's slow to load, slow to render, unusable on anything other than the huge screen size used by the "designer," and I still can't find what I want.
Whose fault is that? Maybe it's not the graphic designer's fault, but it's certainly making the web an unpleasant, unrewarding, and sometimes downright frustrating experience.
Well, as a designer who does his best to understand his medium and make web pages load as cleanly as possible I can only agree with some of this.
As for my role as a designer, most of the decisions that are made as to what composes the website is not made by me. They are made by people above me in our company's chain-of-command. Most of these people have no idea what's involved in making a website but if I wish to continue receiving a paycheck I do what they say. I do try to educate them in some ways so that they can understand what's what but it doesn't always work out that way. Most of the things on the websites I work on that I do not necessarily like I can do nothing about, they are mostly marketing decisions.
Some of this hate towards designers can be spread around a bit more I think.
Methods evolve, and truly good design is as much about resource efficiency and user experience as it is interaction dynamics and look and feel.
Today, if our most iconic, beautiful buildings required, like the pyramids, 25,000 laborers hand-stacking mud-brick over a 20-year period, that would be bad design. If our intra-city train systems ran above-ground, powered by steam, that would be bad design.
It's not Graphic Designers who are ruining anything, just as it's not Teachers who are ruining public education. It's bad Designers using inefficient methods.
"Last I checked, “bandwidth” is an infinite resource..."
No it is not. There has to be infrastructure to carry that bandwidth, so there is a very real and physical limit on bandwidth. Also, in many countries, bandwidth costs money. Downloading costs money. I know that in America it is easy to find unlimited internet plans (or close to it), but in many countries every gigabyte you downloads costs money. My limit is 40 gigabytes, for which I pay about 40 dollars. After that, every 10 gigabytes I download is an additional 6 dollars.
Prices for "mobile broadband dongles with data" in the UK. Surprisingly expensive, and they have Fair Use policies. A big plan would be 1 GB per month.
Take a look at ad placement technology if you want a likely culprit for why any given website is making an excessive number of requests per-page-load. In addition to whatever resource is placed immediately onto the page (and the ultimate ad creative), most ad snippets also bring in tracking beacons, additional JavaScript and completely new documents. Designers have a part to play in this, but I would argue that lack of engineering innovation is at fault for the shameful state of ad placement technology today.
As the author points out, it's not an issue of bandwidth so much as an issue of visual clutter and processor power—although watching a page try to make calls to a dozen separate web services before it will finish loading and let me interact with it smoothly is certainly frustrating. That's not necessarily the designer's fault, though, everyone shares the blame there.
No, the problem is that graphic designers generally approach web pages as if they were designing for print or television.
After many years working in large agencies in New York, I can count on one hand the number of "creatives" who knew any more about the technologies that make up the web than a little basic HTML 1.0, at best.
I started my career as a print designer in the 1990s. Designing for books and magazines, you had to understand your medium. Any print designer worth their salt regularly went on press checks, knew the difference between a sheet-fed litho and a web-fed offset press, how linescreens related to dpi measurements, how trapping worked, drum vs. flatbed scanning, all that.
Compare that to graphic designers for the web, who in my experience have little to no understanding of how a browser renders code, or how different services communicate.
The best graphic designers aren't trying to be programmers, but they know the medium they're working in, and they don't try to force it to be something it's not.
Beauty, usability, and performance aren't mutually exclusive concepts on the web. It's just that most clients only care about the first one (until the site has already launched), and most designers don't have enough knowledge of the second two.