Web design is not dead, but the term “web design” is dying

The recent post by Sergio Nouvel announcing the death of web design was an interesting read. Using that sort of headline was always going to turn heads in the web community. Mashable re-printed the article which led to thorough responses from Smashing Magazine and Paul Boag. The article outlines many symptoms that will contribute to web design’s ‘imminent death’. I think the term web design is dying, but the skill is very much alive and has evolved into digital design.

When I first started designing websites, you designed and built a website and that was that. There was little thought for SEO, performance and mobile user experience. Smartphones didn’t exist. Getting online with the phones that could access the web was excruciating. Responsive web design was a long way off and big social media was in its infancy. Advances in technology allow us to solve these challenges with digital strategy, of which digital design is a part of.

We now have a whole group of challenges that cannot be solved with design alone.

We now have a whole group of challenges that cannot be solved with design alone.

Grabbing a $50 template will get you a website, but code and images alone won’t get you over the line. Clients need the flexibility of a custom built digital product that suits their objectives, customers and content.

Designers obsess over tools and scripts to make their lives easier. Over the last year we have integrated Grunt into our workflow. Grunt is great at handling a whole host of monotonous tasks. This is where automation comes into its own. Our designers and developers now have more time to refine their work knowing time isn’t against them. An average designer will sit and compress a bunch of images by hand in Photoshop. A good one gets Grunt task to do this for them.

Automation tools are great. But not the only answer.

Automation tools are great. But not the only answer.

Automation isn’t contributing to web design’s downfall. We limit how much automated tools encroach on our workflow. Telling your client the website looks and acts the way it does because you let the automated web builder do the hard work might not go down too well. Unless specified early in the project, clients want a personal touch. We also like clients to have an input into how what the digital product looks like. It’s a great way to keep the client involved and engaged with the project. Strategy, rather than automated tools, inform the visual look and functionality of digital products.

The art of designing a website is far from dead. But the term is dying. We like to think of it as digital design, that acts as part of a the wider digital strategy. We cannot use the term web design to describe the vast range of skills needed to create a successful website.

A website isn’t just pages of code and images rendered in a browser, there’s a lot more to it than that.

 

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