From Andy Rutledge’s post, Painting a Better Landscape:

Professional Web designers who don’t understand the fundamentals of design are frauds. And soon, the people who pay for web design will catch on to that fact.

This would be nice if it was true. I’ve previously written about content rather than design because we constantly encounter clients who require that their website looks or behaves a certain way or incorporates specific images, fonts and colour combinations.

Most clients do not know what constitutes good design. Those that do tend to come from advertising or marketing. Those that don’t are not able to distinguish good designers from bad designers. Low-cost low-quality solutions will always win, thus continuing the existence of bad designers.

This creates two groups of designers and clients. Clients that appreciate and respect design will go to the good designers. Those that don’t will go to the bad designers. Is this a bad thing? Yes: for the clients that get bad websites. Unfortunately, the pain endured through a bad website is still bearable, and with the increasing sophistication of software tools it will become even easier and cheaper to produce a bad website, and therefore less painful for the client. I wonder how many people who have iWeb now consider themselves web designers.

Andy’s remarks that “the business community’s grasp of design will continue to expand.. making room for skilled designers and very little for the rest”. I hope this becomes true, because it certainly isn’t true from where I’m sitting. Or maybe it’s just that we’re going after the wrong clients? Well, we knew that anyway, as the next couple of months will demonstrate.