Personally, I like clean, minimal designs. I'd have been happy with anything between 2-4. Stage 12 (or finished) is completely over-the-top for my taste. Tags are hard to read (red is too dark) and don't tell me anything about the depth or breadth of discussions that will be on these topics. Devdays font is coming off too strong in the final one. In Stage 4, StackOverflow was clearly visible and Devdays seemed pretty significant too. I was instantly able to make out that it was a 5-city dev conference by the folks from StackOverflow. In Stage 4, he could have highlighted some of the key words from the description to give more value to specific 'tags' and put simple links for buy-ticket, speakers etc. As it stands, it's very high on graphics, definitely very impactful, but not too clean or simple. However, that being said, it is still a very good design.
The more I write code the more I agree your sentiments, but when I start to reminisce why I got into web-design in the first place it had nothing to do with the web but more to do with the user's interface; thefwa's most influential [flash] site of all time is Eric Jordan's 3rd release of http://2advanced.com available at http://v3.2a-archive.com/. It is anything but minimal but it remains clean, intuitive to use, and downright awe-inspiring.
IMO, this is an example where a complex view [along with a modular sense of control] can work for busier interfaces.
[added_edit] I think your Stage 4 criticism holds true and for a very good reason, which is that most web-designers don't know how to control or present a view as something the_developer/the_user can rationalize and digest in visual terms according to the model of which it is representing. Generally, the view doesn't need to obsess so much in how the model looks but I think why 2advanced stands out in this regard is how he is able to encapsulate control according to the view and present a modular sense of what information means according to the spaces it occupies.
Hell is flash web pages. I go through tens of advertising agency websites a day and it's all that crap as far as the eye could see. I have to leave click-directions for people to get them to a particular "form", because the bloody thing has no sense of URLs.
It's OK for a design studio's website to be over the top, because they're trying to wow you. But outside portfolios and games, please just give me a vanilla, responsive websites.
You are right, web-site's design and a web-site's user interface are not the same. If anything the UI is just 'a space where stuff can happen' the design should be responsible for handling whatever is happening.
As long as HTTP reigns supreme as a transfer protocol, so will formatting source files as text...
I've found there are generally four stages to my own designs:
1. This is shit
2. Okay, I'm getting somewhere
3. This is pretty good!
4. This is shit
I don't know why, but if I look at a design for too long I end up hating it, even if I liked it initially. So I try to get away from my work quickly if at all possible.
As an animator, this happens to me often - even if the stuff is good!
After you view something for hours on end, your mind become numb to the nuances that make it great. On a tight deadline there isn't always the luxury to actually get away from it. My solution is to look at some work of other animators that inspire me - but only for a couple of minutes - then go back to my animation and prepare myself for the "Single Viewing Moment of Truth". I get one or two truly objective viewings of it until my mind slips back into the abyss, so I keep my pen in hand ready to scribble notes about what I see.
I was just looking at this and one of my Japanese-speaking colleagues walked up and said "Whoa, nice site design. Lots of impact. What the hell is it for?"
