Many years ago, my father gave me one piece of advice. It was the only piece of advice I have ever needed, and has stuck with me, defining many of the decisions I have made.
“Stacey”, my dad started , “ Never be beige”.
It took me a long time to truly understand at a deeper level what he meant by this. At first, I thought it was just some racist remnants from a lost generation. Slowly, it dawned on me. It wasn’t about race. It wasn’t about color. It was about spirit. Beige is, well, safe. Its predictable. Beige is boring.
Lately, I think of the internet as slowly becoming beige. Web design and development has taken this slow painful decent into internet suburbia, where each site looks the same as the one next to it, tiny little matchboxes that follow the same blueprint, plus or minus a few upgrades or features.
This tends to happen in our industry, and it is somewhat oddly bipolar in that sense. We have moments of extreme creativity that are inevitably followed up by a push for usability , and perhaps utility.
We’re trying to find a balance between the two right now. You always want what you don’t have, and its no different when it comes to the internet. When you have immersive, expressive experiences, you long for something simple and intuitive. When you have something simple and intuitive, you start to wonder how you can bring back some of that expressiveness.
Social networks have changed our consumption patterns – consuming small pieces of information about each other and ourselves – resulting in the ‘quantative self’ becoming one of the most popular marketing douchebag terms abused this year, next to momfluentials or millennials.
Where we are struggling most, isn’t necessarily in workflow or process, its in the ever evolving definition for an experience – what makes it a good one, what makes it an exceptional one. We’ve become a society of unquenchable consumers – creating, consuming, sharing in this perpetual cycle that we couldn’t have imagined just years ago. Factoring in devices and technology, there certainly has been a push to create “streamline” experiences – simplifying – aiming for fast over full.
Our work has become more thoughtful. This is most obvious in the trend over the last few years for agencies to develop a strategy department. We think much more about who we are creating for, and why, and how it will be consumed and where. Content has risen again as king , evident by the cost of recent content strategy conferences and workshops. How do we showcase such great content?
It feels very much like there is a prescribed view of what the web should be – quick, fast, relevant, useful. As a community, we are creating this lens for how the web should look based on what we hold in esteem for best practices. Yet, it feels like we have stopped celebrating those experiences that are atypical, interesting, engaging – admittedly perhaps not as useful. These are the sites that make you want to inspect the code out of wonder, not out of some need to police standards. These are the sites you share with others. That make you laugh. That keep you entertained with perhaps no real agenda and that is okay, because they don’t need to have a purpose or provide a use. They exist if only to delight.
Innovation relies on these highly immersive experiences to push the limitations of the technology, to define its boundaries, and help shape its roadmap. Chrome only sites are considered “ experiments”, replacing “beta” as the semi-apologetic descriptor of the decade when it comes to web development. Sure those features might only work in Chrome, but do we need to be so damn apologetic for it? Its like these sites are Canadian. “Sorry! You were trying to get the bland version of the internet and here was I was, existing. I apologize for my existence”.
We are still trying to discover that sweet spot – the perfect balance between the pretty and the usable, between utility and entertainment. Perhaps not everything needs to be one or the other – perhaps they need not be mutually exclusive, for fear of creating this alarmingly beige landscape of internet experiences.
I like my ice cream vanilla, not my experiences.