Adaptive Design
There was an article I wrote over at 3by9 that was concerned about rethinking how we do approach different aspects of the web. One of those involved how we approach design on the web and how in many circumstances it was time to change the way we design in general.
Now I have always been the type of person that pushes for new thinking in the area of design while still maintaining the basic prinicples of design that help people use your site. However, I am fully aware that there is no one size fits all model that applies to every website we come across and yet too many sites are still trying to use that.
Then the other day I came across Jason Santa Maria’s site (”came across” is the wrong way to phrase since I have known the guy for years) and was shocked that someone had put in enough effort to customize the page based on what the entry was about. This was the type of rethinking I was errr thinking about.
Jason Santa Maria
Now his approach means you can’t simply write and publish, but if you are a designer or in charge of a website why would you simply want your site to remain like that? Graphic designers don’t join newspapers so that they can apply one format and then have the rest of the year off. They probably love major events happening that allow them to go beyond the usual frontpage design and let them push the envelope of creativity. Rarely do you see that on the web on a day-to-day basis.
Sites such as Yahoo and ESPN would excel most at a design such as this because their content fluctuates from major stories to minor pieces. When there aren’t any major sporting events happening, ESPN can adapt their page to the hundred columns that their writers produce daily.
That is in a dream world though. For now we seem to be stuck in an age where we are blessed with one redesign of a major site every two years and after a day that redesign has become stale although it takes more than the team behind the design six months to produce it. I understand the extra work it takes for my dream scenario to happen, but it seems to me that the payoff would be well worth it in the end.
I can only hope that as time goes by, more designers and companies decide to push the envelope and rethink how they handle the web or hire Jason Santa Maria to do it for them.