[ringmaster]

He makes a good point in that design generally sucks on the web, though I disagree with practically everything else in this article, which seems to lay all of the blame for bad design on poor web standards and the need for revenue-earning advertising. Design needs to support the content - be it text, photo galleries, or advertising - not vice-versa. The complaint is valid, but the targeted cause is completely incorrect. Instead, try taking aim at factory CMSes that cram all content into a poorly-designed blog-like form factor and a lack of imagination, knowledge, and skill on designers' part for integrating a good design with those tools.

And... Should web designers learn to code? Absurd question. If you don't code, you're merely a hack graphic designer, not a web designer. You don't need to code all your designs, but you need to know code well enough to know that your design can be implemented; therefore, you need to know how to code.

[jfb]

Disagree. Why are those CMS so god-awful? What're the incentives that they're designed to achieve? Badness in tooling is usually a symptom, not a cause.

[ringmaster]

It's a byproduct of a one-size-fits-all-content design for a CMS that all of their output looks like the same drivel. In contrast, if a designer had the opportunity to hand-design each content page distinctly, such a site would look markedly better.

CMSes are not built to produce beautiful design, but to expedite content publication into a designed-once template, so it's no shock that their output typically exemplifies bottom-barrel design.

[jerf]

"It's a byproduct of a one-size-fits-all-content design for a CMS that all of their output looks like the same drivel."

I think this is a really important point, and want to further expand on it. The New York Times was cited as having a bad website. However, on occasion, when they put their mind to it, they produce a truly beautiful page with some fantastic visualization or something. But it's a one-off; you can't produce a beautiful page for every story, so you get the lowest-common-denominator page for most stories.

A literal paper magazine is a concrete artifact, and a set of designers can be tasked with making each page perfect. A web page on these sites is dynamic and may literally not serve the same page twice. If, as a designer, you don't internalize the idea that these are two extraordinarily different domains, despite the superficial visual similarities of the final product, then you're going to have a hard time accurately diagnosing the core problem. And I do believe many designers make this error on one level or another, when I see these complaints.

In Matthew Butterick's defense, I do think he did implicitly make one very concrete suggestion for how those sites can improve, though, at least in terms of design: Get rid of the ads. It's hard, probably to the point of impossible, to create a coherent design for a website when you are selling to the highest bidder the right to put a bright yellow and orange banner with a poorly-photographed item described in a random non-anti-aliased font unaligned with anything else on your page in the viewer's highest-priority visual space, and a different such thing for each page load. Against an uphill battle like that, is it really any wonder that the web designers of the world have collectively given up?