Does (web) design matter? | Web Directions

• In: Blog
• By: Maxine
• March 24, 2009

Reading about Doug Bowman’s departure from Google, and some of the responses and coverage that has ensued (Kevin Fox, who was a UX designer at Google; Joe Clark, who always has something unique to say; Valleywag), has got a lot of people thinking about something we haven’t questioned for a while: does design matter?

Google’s data driven design approach could be seen as taking design decisions out of the hands of the designer with their wealth of knowledge and talent, and reducing it to something best decided upon by the vast army of users of the site. They don’t see design in the same way that say someone like Philip Starck might see design, ie, as an art form to be evaluated by expert review and design critics. People like me who delight in good design as an end in itself, and who love web design enough to organise conferences and workshops where Australian designers can learn from the very best, can lose sight of the fact that outside the world of web design, very few people care about web design. And no matter how good it gets at its very top end, they probably never will. But that doesn’t have to mean that if you care about design yourself, great web design isn’t something you shouldn’t aspire to.

Afterall, as a wise man once said, “If not everyone appreciates this beauty - if not everyone understands web design - then let us not cry for web design, but for those who cannot see.”

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