The Undesigned Web

In print, everything is designed. The poster, the advert, the vinyl that goes on the shop window. Each object is carefully thought about, constructed and experimented with.

The web has gravitated away from this and that’s due to the advance of content management systems. CMS’s have forced designers to consider more than one piece of content and more than one ultimate purpose in a piece of design. We now design templates for whatever content an author decides to chuck in there without the need to consult a designer. They’re like bins you throw bits of crap into. It becomes impossible to create a piece of design that really grabs a person and rams a point home if it has to accommodate anything & everything that could be poured into it. The thing that really bugs me is a lot of that stuff that gets thrown in that bin isn’t a piece of crap and deserves better treatment than to have bits cut off it to fit into this cookie cutter template — or worse, being left unedited.

I’ve just done it by pasting the above into WordPress.