There is something about thenextweb articles, that makes me not wanting to click on them.

if your front-end framework is limiting your design, you're doing it wrong.

If the web is completely boring, so are magazines and books. I want to read stuff, not enter your UX-suspended parallel universe.

Must also be said, when you actually care about the content of the site, your experience is way different than just popping around looking for design inspiration.

The only thing I find boring about web design is the over abundance of shallow articles like this.

If the web is "completely boring" it's because users want it to be that way. If completely different "out of the box" layouts were desirable everyone would be designing them that way.

What designers have found is that users don't want the web to be a new experience every time you visit a different site. They're not accessing the site for a rich exploratory experience, they want... wait for it.... content. Fun design for the sake of "fun" just get's in the way of accessing the content one is after.

Maybe it's not the best article I ever read, but it's pretty hard to disagree with some of the points they mentioned.

Building websites doesn't give me the satisfaction it used to. One day the gratification abruptly turned off. Trying to get into software or web apps, but that's just me.

I think the biggest point that was missed in this article is the evolution of responsive web design. It's easy to build an experience and design around the constraints of 1024x768, but as soon as you are told it needs to be fluid and work from zero to infinity screen sizes, things go flat... literally.

So what.

hoverstat.es shows some good examples of "crazy websites" probably not as wacky as space jam but people are still doing cool and inventive stuff. Sometimes you just need to dig a bit deeper...

For example: bjork.com

Task for you all:

Take a look at the 5-10 sites you visit daily/weekly.

I bet NONE of them look very similar at all.

Whilst I agree with the article somewhat, it's only analysing a very thin slice of the total content out there. Common content types will be better supported by common design patterns.

Take a look at real life - it's the same deal. Cars generally have 4 wheels and an engine. Houses generally have walls, windows and a door.

Design too far beyond the function it was intended for and it's usually unusable.

The pendulum never stops swinging in this industry, so I wouldn't be too quick to say the article is right or wrong.

The fact is that a lot of websites today do look the same. Is this good or bad? I'm guessing that line will blur in a few years time. My interpretation of the article is simply that we used to take different types of risks before. True? Maybe. But the web is a different animal today than it was 5, 10, 15 years ago.

Opinion: I like cake more than pie.

The web used to be the cool thing. Now with the flat and simple trend in it's a lot harder to make your work stand out. Apps are the new cool thing.

Wow the negativity around web design is actually becoming a bit uncomfortable. This year alone it's been called dead, soulless and now boring. Gee, thanks interwebs :/

Yes it is agreeable, to me at least, that the web design has fallen into somewhat boring state. I've recently been tasked to make a marketing website for Saas product and I instantly pictured how it would look and designed that way. The thing is everytime I look at the other websites that have similar design, I liked the design because it works. It just helps me to understand the product/service better without getting caught up with the surface design of the website. At the end, it's the quality of service/product that sells, not the design and we as designer want to make sure that the web communicates with the audience as easily as possible. The audience out there wouldn't think 'I don't like this website because it looks same as others'. ... or would they? Haha, I can't even conclude my point well :(

Opinion: What a ridiculous article

the web is evolving, fun stuff will show up again. right now UX and usability for all platforms is the main thing. minimalism is huge right now, and thats a good thing, but the web will continue to evolve, new stuff will happen, but the classic space jam site isn't where we are headed.

i agree with some points of the article but i think the web is still fun, it is just more professional. the trends will change

Well! I still see web design is one of interesting tasks. I love to build up new websites with difference style. You may see much difference for 2018 web design here >>

Apart from the obvious things wrong with this article, it's also just not true. I'm working on Virtual Reality UI (which I would consider to be some of the most exciting stuff you can do in terms of UI today), and I still find sites and web technologies that simply blow me away. There are way better and more tools out there to do amazing stuff, than ever before.

Sure, the mainstream websites are going to be restrained, but that's the case with anything in the world that becomes established. Shopping malls are essentially a copy and paste of every other mall, but it works great for that purpose and people are used to it. When a platform matures, it also establishes certain standards. There's nothing wrong with that, as long as people are still innovating, which is clearly still happening as well.

Perhaps the author needs to visit DesignerNews, CssLine, etc. more often, to see what is happening outside of the mainstream.

for years and years we tried to put the content into the focus. Now we are finally at the state where we realized that the content is really what matters and guys like this one start to complain that design is dying. For F***** sake. I am happy that we finally have minimalistic and well designed sites that flow easily into each size and presents the one thing, that is most important, most prominently: CONTENT.

Look at this nike Air website mentioned in the top of the website. What should that be? ok you see a girl running and you can add effects and stuff, so what? What does this tell me about the product? It's a moodboard, nothing else. eye candy that a real customer doesn't need.

Amen, amen, amen!

OMG yes ... so much yes!

It doesn't have to be boring. You can definitely be creative and create Flash-like websites without Flash. See Blizzard: http://us.battle.net/heroes/en/

All mature design fields find convention; without them you would alienate users and increase cognitive load. The chair's pretty much been figured out, but that doesn't stop people from designing new ones and finding pleasure in that. Our job as designers is to use and exploit those conventions to create something new, but familiar enough to be usable. Of course, there's still room for one-off experiments, but most websites should be geared towards the average user. As such, websites are starting to consolidate around certain layouts, features, and iconography. And that's a good thing, not a bad one.

A lot of web design today is all about content and UX. For the most part, to make this experience super easy to use, its super basic in design. A lot of designers that are being backed into the wall and having to learn code use Bootstrap as a crutch. They compromise some of their design to make it fit into a framework. It's easy, it has good documentation and it has a wide audience of support to refer too if something doesn't work. Everybody says they don't work in a framework and that they think outside the box, but I have seen many sites that really are that way. Back in the day, websites wanted you to figure out how to do things. Some sites weren't usable, but some sites were playgrounds ready to be explored.

Meh. The web is a resource of information first and foremost. How can a user digest that information best? By not over designing? Sign me up!

Interesting article, true that with tools that allow us to create great things in few clicks, web designing is now more mechanic than inspiring.