killing creativity, responsively
February 25th, 2015 @ 3:25 pm
yesterday, i tweeted the following:
“mobile sucks the fun out of web design. as convenient as it may be, you can’t make cute layouts in mobile. fuck you, mobile.”
followed by:
“i’ve been doing this for 18 years. imagine a full canvas painter being forced to create/squeeze artwork on a post-it note… sads.”
i am one of those people that loathe change. not only do i loathe change, i can’t stand when people try to fix something that isn’t broken.
when i started doing graphic and web design and web development back in the mid/late 90’s, things were different. exciting, even. i had a personal website (as many others in our little web community that i came across over the years), and every couple or few weeks, i’d switch up the layout. to us, back then, this was challenging and fun. our creative minds would reflect our interests and hobbies, while showing off our photoshop skills. for myself, i came from the world of mario paint. i would make the most complex pictures with that video game. then i begged my mother for a computer. then i discovered paint, and later on, my first boyfriend introduced me to photoshop. it was a fun snowball. once i discovered the layers in photoshop, my life was complete.
coming from the design/dev world of the late 90’s into the 2000’s, i knew the horrible pains of having to deal with early cross-browser bullshit, and the horror of dealing with several different resolution sizes. i started designing in the days where AOL was your go-to browser. YUP, i’ve put in my damn time.
once monitors started going flat, that meant wide. that meant that everything us designers wanted to do – wide scale layouts – could finally be a reality!
…until mobile browsing soon came along. 😐
i don’t really want to get into the debate about mobile dev/browsing. i will say, however, that i’m (obviously) definitely not a fan of it. even though this article is from 2012, it still has completely relative points that i relate to, so i’ll let tom handle it.
my biggest beef has to do with the tweets aforementioned in this post. although i’ve been doing a lot of the header/nav/content/sidebar/footer layouts in the last few years, i still LOVE layouts that are absolutely positioned/fixed/totally creative and OUT THERE. creative, fun, out-of-the-box and different. take a look at how i used to design… it was so much fun, and the possibilities were endless.
granted, i could still pull off a bunch of those types of layouts, you can’t view a lot of them properly, on a phone browser! in fact, i don’t even know if you can scroll iframes in a mobile browser, lol.
i don’t browse mobile websites. i only use safari on my iphone for googling quick info, and browsing shops online that i screenshot of, and check on desktop later. mobile versions of websites are awful, a lot of the time they lack information or navigation. on responsive websites, you completely lose elements of the website. and for what? to read text larger? people, all you have to do is double tap and it zooms in… just sayin.