Design tossers

There's still a strong belief among a significant minority of web designers that you need exciting, original graphic design to have a great web page design. This is not true. Actually, anyone with the willingness and capacity to learn a few basic formulas and disciplines can make a highly successful web page.

Design “aficionados” who promote the elitist theory are just trying to keep a moat of exclusivity around what they do, and projecting their own subjective reality onto everyone else.

When you live with a particular medium every day, the ordinary can fail to inspire, and you start to crave the edgy and the different. You only get excited about seeing new angles on design that you haven't seen before, which make you stop and go “Wow, that's interesting”.

To this breed of designer, novelty, originality and heart-stopping, thought-provoking visuals are the signs of great design because that's what they love. Design done for its own sake is called “art”, and there's a place for it. But when someone tells you that the only good design is shiny, sexy, powerful, and difficult graphic art, they're wrong. That view of things is nothing more that masturbation. In professional terms, it's “design toss”.

And let's not forget that making snazzy graphic design is really hard. And it's human instinct that, if you've invested lots of effort in gaining a skill – often with little outside help or resources - as most web designers have had to do, you don't want every man and his dog turning up and setting up shop next door. You don't want it to be easy, so there's a natural tendency to attack the thing that threatens your hard-earned skillset, creating a defensive moat that only the most determined young turk can breach.

Design tossers often congregate together, praising each other's work and ripping apart the efforts of people that don't have their level of graphic skill. They tend to judge based on style and emotional content alone, rather than how well a design meets its goals.

Note: If you find yourself in a place where you only care about the opinions of other designers, there is help available. The first step to recovery is admitting that you have a problem. The path to recovery involves a daily commitment to designing only what's necessary to achieve a web site's goals by letting its visitors get what they want.