Drawar

Dinosaurs used to be kings and queens of the planet. Nothing got in their way except for each other. They came in many shapes and sizes. Some ate plants and others ate meat. They were complex creatures and each of them were unique in their own way.

If you were to look at all of the dinosaurs and were told you could design your own then you would have a ton of cool features to work with. You could get the wings of a pterodactyl, horns of a triceratops, roar of a tyrannosaurus rex and a number of other bits and pieces. You would take the best of each species to make one wonderful creature.

Odds are though it wouldn’t work out very well. It would fail just like every other dinosaur. This is how some designers like to design. They look at all the great trends other sites are using and they collect them to try and piece together a perfect design. If someone were to ask you what creature from millions of years ago you would love to replicate today due to its greatness would you even consider the cockroach? The great dinosaurs died off and this little, disgusting insect lives on. There is nothing fancy about it and yet it has become the closest thing to timeless we see today.

Be A Cockroach Designer

Maybe your design should be more like a cockroach. Not the disgusting part, but the part that is able to go through trends and changes with very little impact on its success. Craigslist is cockroach design and ESPN is dinosaur design. A cockroach is built to last and although rarely will you come across a timeless web design, this doesn’t mean that your design should need to go through a massive change every couple of months.

If somehow you can create a design that can adapt with the changing times with a couple of small changes then you have something that can avoid extinction. The design of this site is always a moving target due to the changing of features and the growth of the community. It’s a disgusting cockroach continually adapting to its environment, but its underlying principles remain the same since it launched.

There are plenty of times when I want to add a crazy cool graphic, but I know that when I want to make a small change somewhere the graphic might have to go or be adjusted. I’m more fearful of not being able to make the changes I want, when I want more than I am about trying to be the greatest aesthetic on the block. It doesn’t get more cockroach than that.

Turn Like A Train

Maybe dinosaurs were too big and complex to change fast enough to avoid extinction (let’s not argue what caused their extinction). Do you know any websites like that? How fast can Yahoo adapt to the changes of the web? Not very fast at all in my opinion. All they can do is add a new box to the homepage and hope people find it. In contrast, Google just adds a new link when it sees fit.

In soccer (or futbol, football, world’s greatest sport), when I played against a bigger guy who wasn’t as nimble as me I would always laugh at the thought that he was like a train trying to make a quick turn. It just isn’t possible. You don’t want your site to turn like a train.

I don’t have specifics or a guidebook on how to create a design that is easily adaptable, but once you find out that it becomes too hard to make small, quick changes then you are probably looking at a site that is overly complex. I don’t mean under the hood code changes, that’s another issue, but if you need to add, remove or adjust an element on the page how much will it effect your design?

If anything, design is more about the future than the present.