Back in the day there use to be a joke website called "every fucking bootstrap site" [1] where it would lambast the popular design zeitgeist of the time.
I really wish websites would opt for more distinctive looks rather than the massive homogenization we see across the web. Everything looks the same when it doesn't have to. Things can be stylized while accounting for accessibility and usability.
I don't know what to call this "feeling" but man is it depressing. We went from replicating magazines to making unique (and often clashing) home pages to trying to appeal to the most average of sensibilities where it all becomes counter intuitive.
Probably not fair to pin this on w3c because this can easily apply to several hundred other sites.
It really does make you question why bother having a time of designers, frontend developers, project managers, etc, etc to just come up with the exact same thing as everyone else.
I don't know, if there's ever a website that I want to be boring and readable, it's the W3C. I do not want an exciting or unique W3C site. I want it to be organized and designed to be as readable and easily navigable as possible. I do not want to guess how to use a menu or search for links. I want it to work like that thousands of other boring sites I've used before, because when I'm at the W3C, I'm not there to be inspired, I'm there to get some specific information. I don't want any nonsense between me and the spec I'm looking for.
I disagree, I think a degree of homogenization is good for information heavy websites, like government ones [1][2][3] and sites geared towards documentation. Consistency here is good because it makes things familiar and therefore means people spend less time trying to figure things out/find what they're looking for. Creativity isn't necessarily the point with sites like these. Now if you're marketing a product or showcasing something on the creative side, that's a different situation entirely and in that case I agree with you. The Bootstrap wave 10 years ago was indeed excessive.
I think certain fads are a little dreadful in terms of unoriginality - those humaaans illustrations, for example. But I think most of the web really should look similar. I think of brochure websites like resumes: you're trying to depict key points without distractions and obstacles. Just like that one person's "unique" resume is actually the last one you want to read, so is that unnecessarily "original" website.
The insight with "every fucking bootstrap site" wasn't about sites having similar looks, it was about sites haplessly repeating the same design-forward look and feel.
Bootstrap invited sites to use huge full-bleed stock photos, carousels, colorful buttons, large icons, slide out menus, etc when none of that fancy design language actually resonated with the function of the site.
The desire wasn't to mock boring sites into hiring rockstar designers to make their designs even more unique and fashionable. It was for boring sites to lay off on the cheap whoopy doo design (because design-forward content is tiring when too familiar) and just present themselves clearly and without all the shitty pizazz.
This site does have that problem, but its remedy is basically the opposite of what you seem to be suggesting.
I agree with you... except this IS the W3C, and the whole point is they set standards for websites. If they looked nothing like every other site, that'd actually be a bigger problem.
Hang on a bit. If this website should have a "look and feel" like other websites then what is the point of W3C? The stated aim as I read it is to make the web more consistent. But we need diversity, that is where progress comes from.
Google/Firefox/Adobe Flash/React/Angular/etc innovate. W3C just attempts to keep them consistent. They're a standards committee.
"W3C develops these technical specifications and guidelines through a process designed to maximize consensus about the content of a technical report, to ensure high technical and editorial quality, and to earn endorsement by W3C and the broader community."
I'm not addressing if I like the W3C or if I think we'd be better off if W3C was more diverse/progressive. I'm just saying that if you judge them based on their own stated goals, their website's design fits the mission.
Honestly though consistency is probably preferred here. I see top nav, a hamburger icon, a breadcrumb title bar and a search button, I have confidence in my expectations for how those will behave. With a documentation site, the ability to navigate and find what you need takes precedence over being 'delighted' by some landing page.
Actually in this case they broke my expectation by having the search just redirect to duckduckgo with a site parameter.
The Memphis seems like a decently modern take as well with the gradients thrown in.
I disagree with this specifically for the W3C on everything _except_ the illustration on the front, which I have dubbed "big pants people." That's an unnecessarily homogenous design trend, but everything else is homogenous for the purposes of readability and accessibility, which is very inline with the W3C.
To be fair, I'm not sure you want a ton of uniqueness when it comes to documentation, I just want to be able to find what I'm looking for. For example, IBM and ESRI have what I would consider to be terrible documentation because of their unique take on structure.
Oh I love that site! Very appropriate demonstration for what is possible and what is not preferable. I agree that distinctive designs are far better. For the W3C I think they could best serve to have multiple versions of their website to best demonstrate the variety of websites that would occur-- information/static, production/dynamic, non-production/update-able-- since they have reputation as the web standards body.
It kind of depends on what your app is/does. It would be kind of hypocritical that we all settled on the same form factors for mobile devices, but we want the apps that we use on them to all be radically different looking or "artistic".
Most modern UI kits look and feel the same because we have figured out what works and what doesn't.
"why bother having a time of designers" -- on an individual basic application level, definitely. Just get a reasonable UI kit and save the money.
its called having intuitive ux. dont make users think. user settings and notifications go in the top right, logo and home page link in the top left. if you dont do this, you've screwed yourself in a way you may or may not ever quantify.
i agree it can get boring to see bootstrap everywhere, i also agree with "why bother having designers". but at the end of the day, i want my users productive and not thinking.
For me the UK design system page was half cookie banner, half “get started” pop up (which afaict just lets you through to the page you’re already on when you tap it. What’s the point?)
Hardly inspires confidence in this site as a shining example of simplicity and design…
As someone who gets easily upset by bad websites, I actually really don't mind those banners. Why? Because it's extremely smooth and easy to scroll past them.
If I tried to scroll and they followed me, and it was all laggy, then yes it would be pretty bad.
I couldn’t scroll past either of them. They both occupied fixed positions in the viewport, and I couldn’t see a single pixel of the rest of the site until I not only made a decision about cookies, but also tapped the “get started” button which allowed me to see the page I was already on.
Edit: after trying the page again in a private tab, you’re right, you can scroll past it. But I had no idea that was the case when I first saw the site. Because the banners occupy the exact size of the viewport (I assume this is intentional) there is no indication that scrolling is even possible. You just have a huge set of banners taking up your whole screen. I stand by my statement that this is a terrible example of good design.
Only criticism i have is i ended up on a search form and after submitting to it the page reloaded and the results were below the fold. Otherwise yep, very fast and clean.
If the designer is reading this thread. My fellow human, please swap out the corporate memphis landing page image with something that's less overused in web design today.
For people who don’t know, Corporate Memphis (aka Alegria, Homoglobo) is a style of illustrations that features extrahuman attributes, such as non proportional bodies and non-existing skin colors. It has been credited to Facebook, and was explicitly made to be modular (as in designers are replaceable).
Obviously beauty is subjective, but to me this style has strong connotations of cynical corporations, eerie feelings of minimalist facelessness, toxic positivity and an anxious alignment with current political winds, clear enough to minimize scrutiny but vague enough to be entirely unactionable. The mood words are growth hacking and user engagement.
extrahuman attributes, such as non proportional bodies and non-existing skin colors
In particular, huge bodies and tiny heads; it's the exact opposite of tiny bodies and huge heads, which also exists as a style, one that is rarer outside of Japan but definitely has an opposite connotation for me: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chibi_(style)
I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s a reincarnation, such is the cycle of trends after all, but I’m pretty sure this iteration is fairy distinct. I would be super curious if you have some examples though. Are you thinking like clipart?
...are we looking at the same image? https://cdn.w3.org/cms-uploads/Hero-illustrations/groups.svg ? I don't think that's "Corporate Memphis". A distant relative at best, but it's main similarity is being a little bit abstracted. I kind of like it, actually, as iconified people go.
Not only that, there's also the Islamic/Hadith ban of depicting any person, making this a particular bad idea (if the reduction to role models in a corporate memphis style graphic isn't dehumanizing enough in itself).
I’m not Islamic, but my understanding is that Islamic aniconism is generally restricted to representational art in religious contexts. Outside of that context there isn’t generally considered to be a prohibition.
I like when softwares have quirky logos / graphics with personality, like Linux, Plan9, openbsd, there's a bunch more but can't think of them on the top of my head
+1, the deemphasis/degrading of average information density has been disappointing as user. Old site should be kept and used as their ideal demonstration for information-dense websites.
Not sure why previous comments are so harsh towards its design.
The very header copy says the W3C strives to help people build web based on several principles, and accessibility is listed first. And this design resembles that - a strong focus on accessibility and feeling familiar and usable for most people. I don't think doing a "less overused" design in there would keep that goal in focus.
Truth be told, there is no reason to believe that what is popular in web design is particularly good for accessibility or the sensibilities of people. In fact, I'd argue "Corporate Memphis" in particular is something that became overused in spite of the fact that it offended sensibilities for many.
That said, I think over-applying the "accessibility" viewpoint to bleed into things that really don't have to do with accessibility is an anti-pattern. I do not feel like KDE is less "accessible" due to the artwork and character mascots of Tyson Tan, even though it may not appeal to everyone's sensibilities. At the end of the day, I'd argue in favor of unique and memorable designs that feel like they have some personality rather than like something a committee carefully constructed to be as inoffensive as they could imagine.
I like it. It's easy to be against change and difficult to get behind it.
Maybe in attracting developers who criticize it, some will end up finding something educational. The homepage could be more useful, especially around the ways to contribute. But the main categories are right there in the first sentence of the first section, and the data structures makes sense.
The menu is odd. I think I could grow to like it, but it has very harsh transitions for when I pick an option. And, since it is a bit of a navigation
menu, odd that it gives no indication of "where I'm at."
Similarly, before the site navigation, there is a language navigation. However, since it hides the currently selected language (that is, "where I'm at"), I did not actually know for sure that that would be the same page, just in another language, for those links.
I'm also a little disappointed at how bloody nested all of the markup is. Though, I suppose that is my not being current on modern standards? The "nav", in particular, feels excessive at 500 lines of code. I get not wanting CSS wizardry, but I feel like a lot of the items that are in that code should be done with CSS. (Or, have we moved so far that it is accepted to have presentation in the main document nowadays?)
So that's what W3C, Inc. is onto these days? I thought they were into standardizing HTML etc., meaning they follow a process to take HTML review drafts from the whatwg github repo ultimately to recommendation status these days? At least that's what their HTML WG charter says they do in Februars, but they didn't, when last year their review resulted in Steve Faulkner's major edit of the HTML spec to get rid of novel heading level interpretation and the so-called "outlining algorithm" - one of the original innovations that came with Ian Hickson's HTML5.
It's using Craft CMS as the CMS, though that doesn't imply a specific set of front-end technologies or build processes (Craft can use the Twig templating language, or be headless and power a static site generator).
At the end of the day using Bootstrap and Jquery is no different from using HTML, CSS and ES6 JS. They are just tools and anything you build with them can be replicated using other means.
Well i am somewhat interested (cynical?) of W3C itself and this website does not at all detract from my opinion.
I find the layout almost childish and "waffle centric ", the type of website you have when how it looks is more important than the message. (or you want to gloss over any deep consideration of the message?)
I guess W3C is so broad in concept that it is very hard to be specific without turning users off at first visit.
After seeing the dumpster fire that was the Warcraft 3 remaster, and the awfully executed heel-face turn in World of Warcraft's most recent writing, do you really want to see Blizzard make a Warcraft 4?
Unlike most comments here, I think this is very well made!, its much better than the original site, easy to read, easy to understand and invitijg to learn more about W3C, rather than an old website telling to stay away.
I think Debian should do the same, its much better now, but its no fedora website.
Yeah, I love it. It works and looks perfect in my browser with JS disabled and no web components or even css grid support.
All the html and text really are in the page and not just requested later by some javascript application being executed. It's refreshing and looks a hell of a lot better than any JS sites do in my browser.
I think your self-confidence needs a giant boost if you are a white male who is "concerned about being represented".
Why don't you go and check the executive boards for the companies listed in the "Working with stakeholders of the Web" section to help soothe your fragile ego.
> Unclear if that was the intention of the diagram or not.
Of course it was; how could there be any doubt? Surely the designer, or the artist, knows full well what she puts in the picture. The name of the game these days is diversity and inclusion. White males are so passé :-)
Hey man, nothing wrong with wanting to ensure your racial demographic is explicitly represented alongside others that are being explicitly represented!
maybe because w3 stands for "WORLD WIDE Web Consortium"? there is not only USA in this world, it is funny that you are interfering with the rest of the world for your own social and political problems.
I really wish websites would opt for more distinctive looks rather than the massive homogenization we see across the web. Everything looks the same when it doesn't have to. Things can be stylized while accounting for accessibility and usability.
I don't know what to call this "feeling" but man is it depressing. We went from replicating magazines to making unique (and often clashing) home pages to trying to appeal to the most average of sensibilities where it all becomes counter intuitive.
Probably not fair to pin this on w3c because this can easily apply to several hundred other sites.
It really does make you question why bother having a time of designers, frontend developers, project managers, etc, etc to just come up with the exact same thing as everyone else.
[1] https://www.dagusa.com/