10 Trends of the World’s Most Unsuccessful Designers
In today's article I want to discuss some of the most common traits of web designers who fail at design and freelancing in general. Mixed in with these ten items are topics that range from time management to the ugly table codes we've all grown to hate. If you know of something that an unsuccessful web designer does but isn't in this list, make sure to make it known to everyone in the comments section of this post.
Image credit: heartshaped
10 Trends of the World's Most Unsuccessful Designers
Not Using Any Form of CSS
I know you've come across a website or two like this: White background (or even worse, an ugly, distorted image) with bright text on top of it (using inline styling) and the default blue/purple link colors. I'm sure no one here has even done a site like this once, let alone doing it for a living. Maybe it was the case in the early days of the Internet, before CSS and web standards, but not today.
Image credit: Aaron Landry
Making Everything on the Page a Graphic
Here's another example. You open a web page and see a blank screen. After a few seconds, images start to load on the entire site. 20-30 seconds later when the site finished loading - it's ALL IMAGES! The text on the page is displayed as images; the background is an image; the header, footer, and content areas are all images. It's like someone just sliced up a design in PhotoShop (or MS Paint, looking at the quality of their work) and put the images into a website and said "There, we're live".
Using Bright, Blinking Text Everywhere
Today, we see a lot of advertisements on websites with the bright red and yellow blinking text informing us with the message "You've won - click here to claim your prize". But, can you even remember when this was the norm for website designs? Not only is this unhealthy for people with epilepsy who may be viewing the site, but it's just downright ugly and unprofessional.
Stretching Their Time Too Thin and Causing Problems with Clients
Designers who fail at their freelance careers and end up back in an office setting, being employed by others are generally there because they weren't able to get their business off the ground due to bad time management. Their response is always "Yes, I can have that done by tomorrow morning", never taking into account that they've already got 11 hours worth of work to do before the sun rises.
Image credit: CP Food images
Not Utilizing Any Web Trends After 1990
Some people studied web design for a few years and then gave up learning anything new. Even today, new freelancers don't think that CSS3 or HTML5 are things they need to look out for. Guess what, in a year or two, your design style will be outdated and your freelance business will start to dry up, resulting in you having to learn these new trends anyway, so you might as well start now. Another side to this coin is that some people find a web trend (for example, the 3D rounded corner tabs in web designs like From The Couch) and use them 100 times. Don't overuse it, but at least know what's out there.
Never Test their Designs in Different Browsers
This is for the designers out there who still use IE6 (or 7 or 8 for that matter) and don't know about, or test their designs in other browsers. Firefox, Google Chrome, Safari, Opera and many other web browsers are slowly stealing the views of your visitors away from IE users, so you need to make sure you know what your site looks like in other browsers.
Making Things Pretty but Totally Avoiding Usability
A lot of web designers will ensure their designs look visually stunning, but the client they designed for will lose business because the website wasn't built to be functional or capable of moving the visitors to the right areas (for instance, the contact page or checkout page). Remember that usability is always of the same importance as the design itself. Yes, you can make the site visually "pretty" but never overlook the usability and functionality of the site.
Image credit: fluttering silk
Using Color Combinations That Make You Want to Puke
Many designers use 5-6 color's in a site thinking that it makes the site look fun and lively, but at some point during your design process, you must realize that certain colors just don't go well together and do not "remind visitors of a rainbow".
Tables - All Tables!
Alright, so some aspects of a web design can utilize tables in great ways (for example, tables of tabular data) but there is no excuse for a website to be completely coded in tables from top to bottom. 5-6 years ago, maybe, but today, if your site isn't at least using common CSS codes and DIV's for the layout structure, you're way behind the times.
Relying on One Source for Job Leads is a Death Trap
Some freelance designers will only take on jobs that their friends and family recommend. This can work for a while, but "Don't put all your eggs in one basket". It works here as well. Job leads will dry up, work will be few and far between and you'll be stuck without anything to keep you financially secure. You can avoid this by making use of Twitter, job boards, message boards in your target market, cold-emails and various other forms of marketing.
Input from Users on Twitter
I sent out an open call to my twitter followers to ask them for their opinion regarding this topic. Below are some screen shots and links to their answers.
And We Pass it Onto You
I know that you can think of other major taboos of web design that people are still doing today. Let us know in the comments below!
@adammccombs
Do you have design product if the things don´t work?
Well, I have to rethink my life : I have two of them... doh!
Anyway, I would like to expand it to good design of the code itself (wheter CSS or XHTML) : Order and good use of HTML tags!
Please avoid stacking all your html markup or leaving plain lines. Write some comments, name the area, give some clues to those after you who will pick up the design. They will be greatful when it comes to make upgrades or changes and they'll think you're "the coolest designer in the world". Same to CSS, but in that case it would be great to classify or order it according to the main sections of your page (header, menu, content, sidebar, footer).
As to HTML tags, it would be better to use (and see) div as sections, not paragraphs, p as paragraphs, not sections, and h1 (and all alike) as important titles within the content (I used to use h1 for the website title... well, I was wrong!) instead of div with classes like "header_1". And these are a few of them I've noticed... So, let us be SEO friendly!
Come on, cheer up and let's make it fly high!
lol now this is funny. it sounds like me years back before i knew anything about being a professional . good post. check out my site if you get a chance.
Not everything on a website has to have a drop shadow. Use accordingly! :)
Thanks for the post!
Haha...sounds so familiar to a guy I know. He prouds himself as a web expert but all of his web-pages are 1990`s!
The most unbelievable part is that people actually go to him to make websites and he still earns money with it. :D
Stick to a grid! Coding print designers' mockups is always a nightmare :/
These are all things I see all the time but although I only really have a little time management issue (I work as an IT support guy in London and have a 4hr round trip to work) I still get nowhere when applying for design jobs.
I keep at it though and will hopefully get somewhere soon.
I will make sure I don't slip into any of these on my new project.
PS. I am a fully quallified Master CIW Site Designer but none of the above were mentioned through the course.
Thanks for the laugh, guys! What do you all make of http://www.dubli.com, btw? Just did a redesign and am wondering if it wold meet your approval.
I like it :) But the front area with multiple boxes seems just a bit cluttered...
Ha...a few years back, I was guilty of the Photoshop slices one...and inline styles. But hey, I was 10 years old :D
I know of people who are web consultants and web 'designers' but still use all-tables. It just makes me sad...
I could add a few I've seen when reviewing client's websites before updating them.
- Loud Music (of any flavor) that auto starts with no mute option
- Scrolling Marquees Everywhere
- Tiny Tiny Font-Sizes
- Animated Tiled Gifs as background images
- HUGE images scaled down via width/height attributes making the page load crazy slow
Pretty interesting article, but the tittle is ... something not belong to this content. However, I like the points Mike put here and I agree that's all mistakes in design make a poor designer!
Very unique and interesting post to focus on the unsuccessful design mistakes. I enjoyed it. :)
Brilliant article! Had fun reading this, particularly the part about 'not using any web trends after 1990'.
Thanks for sharing
Having the same layout as leader of the same niche, and not being connected to social network.
I would add two more:
** Using JavaScript to do basic CSS stuff
You open a site with NoScript disabled - all markup is wracked. Enable JavaScript and elements move to their proper places.
Can't you do this with CSS?
** Using Flash for primitive sites
Visit a site with Flash disabled - you get a blank page. Allow Flash and you see a basic site with 5-7 menu options and a few blurbs of text.
What was the point of using Flash?
One of the big issues I see is obvious blatant grammatical errors in a webpage. It makes you look unprofessional.
For example: "Using Color Combination's That Make You Want to Puke"
To quote Dave Barry, an apostrophe does not mean "watch out, here comes an S"
I work in Educational Technology and design a lot of online course pages. I'm constantly getting "feedback" from one of the students who fancies herself a web designer.
Her webpages break every one of these rules. Tables, inline styles, font declarations. It's almost directly out of FrontPage.
I have learned to promptly find the delete button when I see her email.
That design should be included here. isn't?
Great read, thanks for posting this. I'm guilty of a few of these, or atleast I have been :p. Will have to sort it out!
Articles like this should be labeled as or posted under "Rants." I don't know how else this is useful. I think I'm in the wrong place...
@Alex Kilpatrick - nice!
Hi,
I found this article useful and all the points raised by the author are just fine. Try to judge yourself on behalf of these points and then decide yourself.
I myself following all these points already and I am a successful freelancer gaphic/print/web UI designer/xhtml-css developer.
Regards,
321webdesigner
Stating "Making Things Pretty but Totally Avoiding Usability" and than you post PRINTSCREENS from Twitter...? Is that a joke or something?
Making everything on the page a graphic -- *ahem* and posting a giant screenshot of your Twitter page ;)
Can I also get a "heck yeah" to:
Anything with bevels (3D tables!)
Animated GIFs (spinning @ signs to email me!)
Neon green
Patterned backgrounds
Underlined words that aren't links
Links that aren't underlined
COMIC SANS
I could come up with these all day :)
Yes, the CSS formatting! Grr.
When I was first learning Web design, I looked to Webby award winners, and found a bunch of pretty sites that used lots of Flash, and were completely incomprehensible for navigation, so I definitely agree with the “Making Things Pretty but Totally Avoiding Usability” one.
thats cool stuff
I'm not sure that I agree that using the default blue/purple link colours is a mistake. That one depends on your audience. Non-sophisticated users at least understand that blue/purple combo and I quite often declare it in my stylesheet if I'm designing for our in-house intranet because most of our users don't even know what a browser is.
@Sherice Jacob: I concur that underlined text that turns out not to be a link should be punishable by maiming.
I did actually come across a site the other day where they still had that lovely early 1990s trend of a bulleted list, where the bullets were all gifs and the bullet itself was the link, but the text wasn't clickable. There's a trend I don't miss.
Bevels. Drop Shadows. Lens Flare.
In any combination thereof.
Helvetica in Firefox on a PC... it hurts my eyes! <3
I'm sure IF I installed the Clear Type addon for FF it might look better, but why should I? I know my clients won't. =P
Abusing the @font-face ability... and not testing/choosing the best font when using it. I've been playing around with it in my last couple of projects, I still find it frustrating that after all these years there still isn't a standard in font display.
LOL! This is so true of me, once upon a time. Glad I got over all this by keeping myself up to date following sites like this one. We need to keep abreast with trends people, its never too late to change!
Oh, please please please check your type before upload. Its rediculous what some designers do out there, especially in South Africa..jeez!
thanks for sharing. i just wish there will come a time very soon that there won't be a need for designers to test in IE6.
Nice one...