retro design

… all is optional.

Time for a quick look back through my days in webcarpentry. No clear divides on the interweb anymore, and intermixed with a boatload of audio-visual, social media and gaming formats the humble webpage holds its position well.

More reliance on ready-made solutions and libraries behind websites now than when I started, and web standards have evolved. Better browsers now too.

These days one can spread text and/or images across featureless screens and call it “retro design”, so web design has gone full circle and then some since I started. All good with that, as creative designers have been provided with so much to play and/or mess up things with over the years that they will never run out of options.

Design trends evolve and expand until they reach critical mass – the same look found everywhere. They are then left behind as “old and outdated”, and “new ideas” are introduced.

Why does anyone throw out what works, just to go another round between what is “in” or “out” at any given time, until the circle is completed once more?

Well, I don't know, and few in the business seem to have good answers to that question other than that they are bored with what they have and want something new. Besides; designers and front-end coders need jobs to go to too, which of course is correct.

That is OK for private and/or experimental, sites, but radical visual changes to commercial sites most likely just confuse and throw off frequent visitors for no good reason.

upgrade under the hood

All sites can be improved, and additions and modifications can be introduced at any time without frequent visitors noticing much of anything – at least nothing negative.

Adding and testing options is one way to prepare a design for what may come in months and years ahead. Having several alternatives prepared in the form of CSS and scripts does not have to add much code-weight to existing files, and optimisation of what is in actual use may shave off lots more.

I mainly just comment out, or leave alone, what isn't needed at the moment, once I have completed testing all options. The few milliseconds I could have shaved off of first load by deleting CSS and scripts that aren't needed right away, simply isn't worth it with today's connections.
A few things have (most definitely) been improved over the years regarding the global interweb, and gunlaug.com is (most definitely) not a commercial site that has to be concerned about rankings.

honing skills

As I haven't written in this design section for more than two years, it was about time I added a short notice. Have after all upgraded the design you are looking at, and the code behind this site, quite a few times since last writing.
Not that I think returning visitors have noticed much of anything, as most upgrades have been focused on minute details. Finetuning visual imperfections under the hood, so to speak.

I am not as active in front-end coding and web design as I was a decade ago. A few small projects a year will have to do, as that is all I have time, and patience, for.
Main thing is that I keep my skillsets honed, and focus on learning new ways to solve old design issues. I am not much for repetitive routine work anymore, if I ever was.

sincerely georg; sign

Hageland 26.may.2020
last rev: 26.may.2020

same old, same old…

Many designers may disagree, but visually nothing much seems to have changed since IE6 reigned with all its many bugs and weaknesses, and most front-end designers had just quit using table-based layouts.
We may use different, and more efficient, techniques these days, but still aim to achieve pretty much the same visually.

That so many designs for instance have similar area-distribution on wider screens as back then, probably means some of the more basic web design trends from decades ago simply work better than others even today.
Reason for the similarities is of course that how most of us view these things has not changed much since long before Gutenberg's time. Even a caveman and webcarpenter like me can appreciate such a long tradition…

On a regular trip around the interweb we find the traditional two- or three-column webpage, the width-limited one-column webpage, the flex-based newspaper-imitating webpage, and a whole range of variants of these basic formats. What does not fit one format will go in another, often within the same page.
Some pages/sites may be a bit overloaded with smart solutions, and some may not play well with browser-options. As more and more users learn how to override the worst examples of over-eager web designers and coders, we may see less of them.

no revolutions in later years…

Extreme and special screens do excist, but few seem to design websites with those in mind. It is pretty much left to the individual apps to make average websites work well enough for comfort, and the average visitor still simply could not care less how things work as long as they seem to do – same as twenty years ago.

What isn't optional these days, is to accommodate for those small verticals most people surf and do everything else with, one way or another.
Usually the less “design” the better for those small screens, but there is screen-space enough for the clever visual designers on even the smallest smartphones.

So, what else is not new? Pretty much everything on the interweb as far as I'm concerned.

It is just so much easier to code up sites now than back in the old days, since we no longer need to hack browsers to get an acceptable outcome across the board.
We can simply let browsers that come out short continue to do so, as the outcome will be what their users are used to anyway. What doesn't work doesn't work, and nobody but the designer/coder cares.

No more “preferred browser” messages. Almost makes me feel nostalgic…