It’s easy to get bogged down in current-moment considerations when you feel that the time has come to revamp or refine your company’s website. What are the latest web design trends? However, you might also ask: which of those trends are likely to still be relevant in a year’s time, or five years’ time, or even 10 years’ time?
This, in turn, might lead you to what is, in many ways, the philosophy of our present era of web design: resilient web design.
How has web design changed down the years?
That’s a very grand question to try to answer in the confines of one short blog post, but one thing that is certainly noteworthy is how our appreciation of the constraints of the medium of website design has changed.
When the web first came to prominence in the 1990s, for example, web designers were generally those who had previously designed magazines, newspapers and other printed publications. They made the transition from print to pixels, but in the process, brought many of their old assumptions, preferences and biases with them.
It was only natural, then, that they tended to treat the browser window much as they had the printed page. But there was a flaw with such an approach: whereas a newspaper or magazine page had a fixed ratio, a browser window could be any size.
The journey to our present age of universality
It was impossible for web designers to know in advance of the size of a given person’s browser window. What duly began over the decades was a struggle to impose order on this new, exciting medium – the web page – on which it was often much more difficult to impose order than had been the case with printed pages.
So, we got web designers creating pages in ever-greater widths as people’s monitors got bigger – in the web’s early days, most monitors were 640 pixels wide, so they created layouts of the same width. But over the years, this ‘standard’ jumped up to 800 pixels wide… and then to 960 pixels wide.
Similarly, in the early days of devices capable of fully accessing the web – as ushered in by the iPhone – the ‘answer’ seemed to be to design separate mobile-only websites on domains like m.sitename.com.
But what happened when the lines between mobile and desktop devices blurred – when we started getting tablets like the iPad, and ‘phablets’? At this point, it became clear that even this segmented approach to web design would not be very resilient to the ravages of time.
For truly resilient web design in 2017, choose Piranha Designs
Today, of course, web design tends to be governed by very different principles, of serving exactly the same information in exactly the same representation across all of the devices through which one could conceivably access a given website.
We are now in the age of not just adaptive web design, or responsive web design, but resilient web design, embracing the idea of just one World Wide Web.
It’s a philosophy that our own web designers are proud to embody here at Piranha Designs. With all of the above in mind, we’ll leave you with a quote from the inventor of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, in an article for Scientific American on his most famous creation’s 20th anniversary.
“The primary design principle underlying the Web’s usefulness and growth is universality. The Web should be usable by people with disabilities. It must work with any form of information, be it a document or a point of data, and information of any quality – from a silly tweet to a scholarly paper. And it should be accessible from any kind of hardware that can connect to the Internet: stationary or mobile, small screen or large.”
Contact Piranha Designs today for more information about our complete web design services.
