Web Design Manifesto 2012 – Jeffrey Zeldman Presents The Daily Report.
I’ve got to hand it to Zeldman (again), I really enjoyed reading this and found it very refreshing. Our community is super critical. I wouldn’t call it cut-throat and I wouldn’t really set it apart from many other industries the world over. The trouble for us resides in our environment. It’s all too easy to let our opinions fly off the rail when we’re protected by a thousand miles of ethernet.
Combine that with this fascination with what “the big guys” are doing and we’ve got a recipe for disaster. It’s all too easy to become snarky when someone in the spotlight tries something new. Please don’t confuse these comments as being dismissive to the community as a whole, I’m right there with everyone. I catch myself doing it all the time.
Jeffrey is really on to something when he takes note that the services everyone’s currently going nuts over completely abstract the designs we pour our hearts over and plop them into views much like his new design.
While I recognize that the original intention of said applications was to make reading the horrendous, ad-filled, paginated, unreadable articles easier to digest, it doesn’t change the fact that the applications have proliferated into our daily lives for much more than that.
If anything, this article gave me the ability to put the breaks on for a second, to come up for air and look at a bigger picture that may be forming. Web design is undergoing major change in response to the mobile Web. That’s more than awesome, but it’s again reset the playing field. And it won’t be the last time.
