The future. We hear all about it all the time. Man has a great need to see his future before he gets there and for as long as I can remember there has always been people looking ahead to what is coming, people who dream, people who create. When I was a kid ‘Tomorrows World’ promised a world of flying traffic, jet packs and robots. (You have no idea how disappointed I am that I don’t have a jet pack yet!)
Obviously what I have learnt from all of this is that the future isn’t set. In a great many fields the future is still being designed and could be anything, but what about the Internet.
I wrote a post a few months back on my blog asking if the CSS gallery sites are good for creativity or not. If you fee like reading through it you can find it here . In this I point to the number of trends the web design community has gone through just recently, mainly in part I feel due to lots of designers using these sites for ‘inspiration’. The internet has gone from a place with many different design styles to just a hand full as templates and design trends take over more and more sites. Each site style matches the next, innovative designs are common place within a week as numerous copies and ‘inspired by’ sites appear.
So how do you go about inventing the next big thing? How do we get something new?
Well for me my main place of inspiration has to be the world around me. The world is a big beautiful place (if you look at it the right way), information systems are part of our everyday lives, navigation devices are everywhere, signs, maps, advertising, eye catching artwork (everything that can be used in a web page design) are so common place in our lives we hardly see them any more, but as designers we should! Linking in these design ideas can embed a very real world feel into a site. As they are so common to us using a navigation style that you have seen working in the real world can just make it totally instinctive to use.
There is a big push to bring the worlds of print and web design together. More and more we are seeing links between the two as print designers begin to take advantage of the new ideas in web coding to get better fonts and more control, web designers are expanding into print as well, taking a new approach to the print sector (and with electronic paper being developed as quickly as it is you may well soon have actual live web pages held within newspapers etc. Imaging a world where you can pick up a hard copy paper/magazine, see an advert for something you want and can buy it from that paper! Not that paper and magazines will be around much longer in my opinion as the readerships of many papers have dwindled and been replaced with an online audience.
I use print philosophies in my designs more increasingly these days and I love the new era of typography that we are beginning to embark upon. Big readable fonts, with almost no restrictions! It’s what web designers have been clamouring for for years!
But are there other fields we can “borrow” from? Given the wealth of new web technologies out there, how about borrowing design styles from some of the more dynamic areas of the world, T.V. street advertising for example?
There are even parts of the Internet advertising that we can include in our designs. I am sure that as technology is improved Viral advertising will become more and more integrated with the actual website it is advertising, or rather the website’s design will become more viral and used as part of the brand awareness for large companies. Don’t ask me how this will happen, I’m just putting my ideas out there 
Now as designers we can open up new avenues of design styles, implementations of existing and upgraded technology, interesting new colour schemes and new API inclusions but is there really anything NEW left to design? Are we just re-inventing the wheel so to speak?
One thing that really stops me in my tracks are, I presume, what stops a lot of innovative from ever seeing the light of a monitor are conventions…no not a convention like Web Source East (Still a few places left open! Get ‘em while they’re hot!)…conventions like menus have to be at the top or the side of a page. Yes this is an obvious one as to why it’s convention but are there other conventions we could break or are scared to?
The main question is, without large budgets for proper user testing how does a small company break conventions and keep the content easy to use for the average person using the Internet? Do we dare to break conventions?
I like to ask designers a simple question…
Are we trapped in a box? A flat box at that!
Conventions are handy things, using what people are used to to make something intuitive to them is a good thing but it’s not the way to stand out from the crowd, it’s not the way to get noticed!
I have heard it said that if you are to break a convention you have to make it easy enough to understand how to use so much that it replaces or is exactly as good as the convention that is being broken. This, however, isn’t that helpful if you are looking to create a site that is nothing like the others. I remember the days when Tomorrows World promised me the world and I also remember the new technologies that emerged around the same time. All of these new techs had a manual the size of the Bible to read through to find out how to use it as it had reams of new features to explain.
Now obviously, there’s no way you can expect anyone to read a manual to be able to use your site. There’s good evidence out there to show that even simple instructions on sites go ignored! I mean hey when was the last time you bought something gadgety and thought “right I’ll just sit down and read this 50 page manual on how to use this thing before I start playing!”. You just don’t do it! People get stuck in and work it out for themselves, yes some may get frustrated but more an more people today are “internet-savy” and will stick with it for at least a little while before giving up. So as long as the change isn’t so severe that an average internet user can’t use it then most people should keep up with it. Yes you won’t take everybody with you but if it has enough impact those people will learn!
There is also the fact that the more we push the boundary of that box the wider it will become. Everyone using the Internet is learning to use the Internet, it expands at an incredible rate and your skill set to us it has to too!
Just remember to make sure your new, ground breaking, convention breaking site gets featured in all the CSS gallery sites LOL
So can you see us all using jet packs in the future? or do you have another prediction for the future? I’d love to hear them
