Almost every novel I read makes me want to write, just as most cookbooks make me want to cook and many photography books inspire me to take photos. I have yet to come across any inspiring books on web design, though, and I suspect it's because web designers don't do as much pure design as the title implies. In other words, perhaps web design has failed to become an artistic medium and simply lacks the material to make an inspiring book.

So I wonder if web designers could become better designers if they emulated the Architect's system of getting an engineer's opinion only after his or her imagination has been inked on paper. That is, perhaps we should free ourselves from writing html and css as a profession. Such a strategy might have a better chance at reproducing the radical genius of Frank Lloyd Wright and Frank Gehry, if only because web designers could stop handicapping themselves with their fascination with code and the limitations code implies.

My reckless thought is that webdesign as a craft isn’t practiced in a way that is conducive to creative breakthroughs. The focus on HTML, CSS, usability, standards, etc. has produced a field more than capable of building bulletproof websites, but the near cookie-cutter habits of webdesigners, often tossed about as “best practices,” has left many portfolios looking like the many variations on a standard theme. Web designer’s focus on code is reflected in our disproportionate talk of code and the vagaries of usability, etc., so much so that the discussion of the design half of web-design is all but forgotten. A two second critique of the prettiness of a site usually does it. I’m certainly not the first person to point this out, and I’m as guilty of code-centrism as anyone else.

Web designers, of course, are paid to write usable, lasting, cross-browser, standards based code, often wrapped in cookie-cutter design patterns at the request of clients, not to develop radically new web experiences. At least not very often. And perhaps the common threads we see in many websites is also the result of the web’s very peculiar history and set of aging technologies, marrying in web designers what could be much more creative or design-ey work with a jargon-laden set of pseudo code that really does require the clean room mentality of an engineer to master. All in one person—an architect and an engineer in one. It’s no wonder that we find it so remarkable when someone does anything even slightly novel on the web, whether it’s taking our adopted standard of publishing content and twisting it just a bit (Tumblr) or just making something beautiful. I start every design project with the same BluePrint grid layout, the same typography stylesheet (Helvetica really is God’s favorite typeface), and the same black and white palate. I don’t know how I’d live without these frameworks, but I also feel more and more confined by this setup as my aspirations as a designer grow.

Oddly enough the web designers that I respect most for their design abilities are also highly respected for their code—not the type to hand off Photoshop files to an “HTML monkey” to code up. That is, I find both that discussions of web design are often muddled in talk of CSS, frameworks, etc., and are generally uninspiring, but also that the best designers are those that know their code. I don’t know what to make of this except that maybe smart people make good designers, too, just not that good : )

In closing I must say that I certainly have no right to recommend to other designers that they abandon the HTML way and try something radically new—I have yet to do so myself—but I can’t help but wonder what kind of websites we’d have right now if there were no web designers, just a stable of artists, print designers, and a gaggle of engineers to do their bidding.