With today’s technological proliferation in many aspects of our daily lives, we can see a degeneration of our work ethic, creativity, and plain motivation. Now that we have computers and phones doing every nuance of our bidding, we’ve become, in a word, lazy.

As a day-to-day schmoe, this didn’t come to me as much of a shock, but as a designer this means that the very tools I use to create may actually be sapping the juice out of my imagination.

I realized all this when I stumbled upon an article called “The Dying Art of Design” from Smashing Magazine, which infers that modern designers rely too heavily on built-in program tools and effects, online freebies, and inspiration lists that what they end up designing becomes so diluted and generic due to the massive and immediate information transfer of the Internet. Trends spring up and designers pounce on them to gobble the best and brightest of visual elements until newer, cooler trends emerge.

This grabby reflex is most evident in web design, where the life or death of a website depends on the tenth of a second synapse snap from an online user. The site needs to be the latest and trendiest in order for it to survive for the next couple of years. It seems that the only easy solution is to just regurgitate the same trendy design over and over with some color changes here and a few slight variations there. As a web designer, this hurts. It makes it very difficult to avoid and overcome the parrot-follower bottleneck on the highway of good design. I admit that I have recognized some of this in my own work process, but many times projects end up creating themselves (eventually) with a guiding hand from myself. I see these trends and try to reach for something further. I want to create designs that shine through all the gunk in a Google search.

But still, I circle around and ask myself, “Am I doing something wrong?” “Are my ideas not good enough?” And then I shake myself and say, “No, this is what the client wants and it looks good and works well.” I’m a designer, albeit a freshly scrabbling one, and I revel in solving online organizational problems through my designs.

To temper my budding ego, I’ve been told that there is no more originality in web design, that the layout and functionality of a site can only work properly in so many different ways due to people’s ingrained expectations. It’s like a book. You can make the cover pretty and stunning, but inside there is still a title page, a table of contents and the chapters. It’s so because that’s how books are made. The same goes for a website. But that shouldn’t stop you from meeting these challenges and trying to be different. There are some really great books that defy the age-old layout. Web design should do this too, but lately it seems stuck in this cyclical redundancy of blah.

So maybe design is feeling its age a little, but it still thrives. Just don’t turn into some click-puppet designer spitting out site after site only to brag about how many tick marks you’ve scratched on the wall. Make each project count. Immerse yourself in the identity of the company and rewrite it most awesomely on the screen. Like they say in the Smashing article, take the time to read a book for tips and ideas instead of mimicking someone else’s design, and also experiment with handcrafted details and drawings instead of default effects. You'll learn something new and your designs will thank you for it. Decide to make a little art because quality always outweighs quantity.

And then, if you make something good, write a blog about it and show it off.  Hopefully my garbling does some good, too.