How many times over the last six months to a year have you seen this? You go to a new website and you see a still image with text in the dead centre, usually a few words, scrolling up you then see three columns of text, not two, not four…three. With cute little icons above them. The similitude has been spreading at an exponential pace like a viral video with too many cats.

Why do we subscribe to sameness? What is it about Team Follow Fashion that has a hypnotic control over how we produce and why we deliver beautifully tweaked rubber-stamps? Why do we love to shackle ourselves to styles?

The zeitgeist

Every era and sub-era has a style that has been defined by a few minds. This applies to every sphere of human endeavour that is open to some sort of design. Whether it is architecture, furniture, fashion, print, web design or product design. These styles decide, for the most part, the physical definition of our world.

One “moda” hits the scene, dominates for a few years or decades and when we get tired of that or when it has percolated throughout the entire system a new one comes on the scene which is usually opposite to the previous style.

These style swings usually see-saw between two very established poles of thought, introverted vs extroverted, subdued vs loud, opulence vs economy, conservative vs liberal. This ying/yang juxtaposition creates an interesting dissonance of energy that drives the creative world, how we make it and how we talk about it.

One of the most obvious examples of this is our built environment. Even a casual researcher into architectural styles will plainly see how one style was almost always a response to the style before it. Where one “design genre” after another either evolved (slightly or significantly) the idea of the style before it, or became the stark opposite of its predecessor. Renaissance, Tudor, Baroque, Palladian, Georgian, Neo-Classical, Victorian, Bauhaus, International, Modern , Post-modern, Deconstructivism, etc. These styles have been and are driven by a variety of factors, from popular or available materials, societal and demographical and of course the occasional architect with a burning-in-the-bones desire to do something utterly different. For example, Antoni Gaudí, Frank Lloyd Wright or Santiago Calatrava.

But despite the occasional outlier, the zeitgeist approach to design is till the de rigueur for the vast majority of architectural work that goes up.

Websites are no different.

A little bit of fear

We stick to a basic template of thought. A modus operandi that doesn’t make anyone fret and keeps clients from getting too nervous. In web design as previously mentioned this is also the case.

As the world of web design has evolved, most of what is created does not go outside of a brief list of parameters. An unwritten law of design that defines all that we see on our screens.

Websites have for a while started to look a lot alike over the last three to five years. As clients more and more ask for clean and simple layouts, this desert of starkness reminds me of the scene in The Matrix where Morpheus introduces Neo to “the loading programme”. A vast tundra of white with absolutely nothing special or memorable. Sameness all around.

Not wanting to go against the grain of the clients wishes and without a solid rubric or framework for making relevant design decisions, it is easier to copy a design, tweak a few images, drop in new words and you have your “own design”.

There is a vast difference between website production and website design. Anyone with the technical skill to make a site can do so. But very little web design happens. While we are busy stamping out ACME widgets aka new websites, the craft of applying human factors, cultural indicators and user-driven emotional design gets trampled underfoot. Far too often I hear resonating and ricocheting in my head the following ominous phrase by Morpheus: “Welcome to the desert of the real”

How do we leave Team Follow Fashion, break the cycle of sameness and start creating sites that are wonderfully unique to the business and clients that require them?

1. Take design seriously — Web design and web production are two different animals, treat them as such.

2. Take time to study your target user — Understand what drives their actions in your specific space, why they do what they do.

3. Design delight into the product experience — Make them feel at home. Reduce the friction it takes to get from desire to delight to done.

4. Make it bespoke, truly customised and highly original — Generic is a poison, true original and “unique to you” design is the antidote. Use it, use it well.

Your business is a unique animal, why in the Www (WORLD-wide-web) does it look the same?

Yorkali Walters is a graphic designer & photographer with over 15 years in the design industry. He’s also a vice-president of the Jamaica Design Association (JDA). Contact the JDA at info@jamaicadesign.org