First steps
Current web designs are exactly what they should be and have to be: first steps. They accept the limited typography of html. They often put considerable amounts of text on a single page. They display graphics appropriate for (and appropriated from) other media, especially print. They still manage to convey the excitement and promise of the web--its potential for unlimited access and endless chains of association. And they convey the heterogeneity of the web.
Today's designs evoke the prior media of print and photography. (Marshall McLuhan argued that the content of a new medium is always a prior medium.) These evocations help us understand what is possible in the new medium by reminding us of prior limitations and possibilities. They validate the new technology and give us time and space to experiment with new designs. First steps can work precisely because they accept and exploit the limitations imposed in reconstruing older media.
So, Internet business pages have begun by imitating older forms such as brochures or posters. For that reason, browsing through pages in the Internet mall is a more pleasant experience than the noisy, manipulative commercials that we now see on television. Omaha Steaks is a quaint example. The steaks are depicted with that glossy photorealism that has characterized food advertising for decades. Such pages recall a gentler era, when advertisements for crispy fries and frosty drinks used to run between features at the drive-in movie. At the other end of the business spectrum, Fidelity Investments seems to have put its whole set of investment brochures on the web. These too are familiar and therefore less threatening forms.
Art Crimes is a web site offering photographs of extraordinary graffiti from cities around the world. Graffiti is by nature constrained in time and space. It is hidden away in corners, and it lasts only so long as it does not attract the attention of the authorities. Art Crimes lifts graffiti out of this context and places it in the international and very public context of the Internet. This idea is the design; no elaborate layout is needed or wanted.
The other end of the artistic spectrum is occupied by traditional museums, which are sites for "legitimate" art. If putting graffiti on the Internet seems to legitimize graffiti, putting a museum on the Internet seems to popularize its art. Yet the elegance of good museum pages comes from the same wise decision to let the graphic content control the page design, as is the case with the Emory Carlos Museum.
We could multiply the above examples almost indefinitely: there are many, many sites that recapitulate older forms. They constitute the present web. The question remains: what is the future of web design? How will design grow beyond such first steps?