Sometimes the web development industry feels very much as I expect the fashion industry feels. Of course that would be assuming I ever paid any attention to fashion. Really, you should see how I dress. Think Magnum PI sans mustache and slightly less thigh. Regardless of my personal tastes in fashion I am aware that, for the general public, every season brings with it a new fad of some kind.
Web design sees the same trends, whether we are talking about the “it� color scheme you see so much you think we went from 216 web safe colors to 2. Perhaps you see it in the hot new programming language that gives us so many new abilities that everyone is using them. Whether or not they should is debatable. Maybe, we see it in the way so many layouts start to look like they were sliced from a cookie cutter.
The web not only mimics fashion in its fads, but also in the way we are able to watch styles evolve. We see the fashion world evolve its styles so drastically, that eventually everything comes full circle to where it began. If memory serves me, bell bottom jeans made a brief come back in the ‘90’s.
Example: I recall making my initial leap from what I like to call “high school� web activities (you know, scouring the ol’ triple w for low res pictures of Elle MacPherson for my desktop wallpaper) to a genuine attempt to bring reall content, design, and user appeal to the online world. Back then, the average screen resolution we were designing for was 640 x 480. Gradually, we evolved to 800 x 600 and finally to 1024 x 768, which seems to be fairly standard these days. Now, with the ever expanding world of hand held devices becoming increasingly web capable, we once more must consider such miniscule dimensions in our design processes.
Don’t get me wrong. I love all of these gadgets. I was playing around on an ipod touch the other day to view the Fisticuff Design site, (it looked gorgeous, by the way), and I can admit that I cannot wait to have one. I suppose I just find these things amusing in that I just begin to get the hang of something and someone has to go and put everything in an uproar. I guess it helps to keep you on your toes.
