Website assumptions

Every great designer makes mistakes. They get things wrong and start over again and again until their design is perfect. While these great designers produce amazing works of art, only a few innovate. It is innovation that the best designers lack and the thing that only the great have. What is innovation and how do [...]

Every great designer makes mistakes. They get things wrong and start over again and again until their design is perfect. While these great designers produce amazing works of art, only a few innovate. It is innovation that the best designers lack and the thing that only the great have. What is innovation and how do you achieve it?

The truth is innovation is not something to be achieved. It isn’t tangible. It’s like air. You can only harness it. It is imagination. It is an idea. This means you need to be creative. You will have to think outside the box, and ‘in the box’ you can’t think ‘outside the box’.

The box is a metaphor. It is the assumption that the box itself is square, that it has 6 sides and stores things. The box is not innovation, the box is assumption. An assumption is not creative, nor an idea. It is defined. This is why the best designers are not innovators….only the great are.

So what is a website? What are the assumptions we make about them?

A website is square; it lives in the browser; it appears on a screen; it looks cool; you can see it, hear it, bookmark it or add it to your favorites; you can buy things on it; it is flat, scrolls up, down, left and right; you interact with it; it has buttons; it has a logo; it has a menu for navigation; it has a footer, a contact page, an about page, a home page; it can have video; it has music and sound; it is on the internet; it is made of code; it is on Google and Yahoo; it informs, it connects, it sends, it receives; it has an address; it is an interface; it loads, you click on it, search on it, and you visit it. There are simply a ton of things a website “is”.

The problem is that “website” is defined, it is not innovative anymore, it’s not new. It is innovative only once and then it’s just a “website”. The moment Henry Ford designed the production line it was innovation. But once his dream was realized, put into action, it was no longer an innovation. It became a standard….a definition….an assumption.

Innovate again, and again…