design (12 posts)

I’m designing a new website, but I’m a developer, Jim, not a designer, so I’m looking at web design inspiration sites for ideas.

Unfortunately, every design on every inspiration site now looks exactly the same. Didn’t the web used to have personality?! So, when searching for design inspiration, I’ve learned to filter the results to articles from the early 2010s or thereabouts.

I’ve always wondered why web design died around that time, but today, I was looking at Breadcrumbs In Web Design from Smashing Magazine in 2009, and I think I’ve figured out why.

Those examples are all actually pretty plain… and the reason is that they’re all using web-safe fonts: Tahoma, Arial, Verdana, Georgia. Designers couldn’t really start using custom fonts until 2012:

  • Chrome has had @font-face support since January 24, 2010 — but Chrome only had 5% market share at that time (IE had 55%, and Firefox had 30%).
  • IE has had @font-face support since March 13, 2011 (and IE still had 45% market share then; Chrome was gaining at 20%, and Firefox was still around 30%).
  • Of course, IE didn’t support @font-face until IE 9, and in February 2011, 12% of the world was still using IE 6.
  • Chrome surpassed Internet Explorer as the most popular browser in 2012.

After we got @font-face, we stopped playing with colours and shapes and borders and shadows. Now, we just use giant photos and typography and call it design.

The golden age of web design as an art form was probably around 2012 — when we could use custom fonts, and we were still in the old mindset of actually making an effort.