The web is as good as it’s ever been in terms of design. Code literacy and CMS’s has raised the general floor of websites and apps that make sense and good for users.
And yet I find myself a bit…bored? Dulled?
That seems harsh or jaded, and probably that’s a component.
But it made me think about why I felt that. It’s not just the sameness of everything. I think visually and interaction-wise, there’s plenty of colleagues doing great and fun experiments.
If I were to interrogate it then I want to point at a narrow expression of tactility. In both a pseudo-physical sense (it’s all glass on our phones after all) and an emotional sense.
We’re in a clean and rounded corner world. Even Google’s Material Design with its layered sheets metaphor—those layers move too cleanly and too slippery. The most brutalist rejection moves too smoothly on those instagram posts and dribbble shots.
Nothing feels rough. Or scratchy. Or fuzzy. Or sandy. Sometimes someone will mess with a bezier animation curve and it’ll be bouncy or oozy. But those are still cousins of liquid-ly smoothness.
On the other end, an emotional tactility. It’s born out of the previous observation, but from a limited vocabulary or palette—the expression and resonance will be similarly constrained.
Think of a famous art piece of a tea cup but it’s covered in fur. It’s disconcerting, it’s tense, it’s solidly rebellious. It’s something the web as a medium can’t do. Maybe with content or the message, but not with it the pixels and movement itself.
Dynamic Hypocrisy 