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Years ago, while I was studying art at the Baskin Visual Arts Center, we were tasked with constructing an on-the-spot, interactive art piece. We had about 20 minutes to come up with a compelling art piece that embodied the fundamental principals of interactivity.

For this project I partnered up with one of my classmates. Five minutes later, we had our masterpiece. It was simple and direct. We stood before the class with two cardboard signs, a box of chewing gum and a stack of singles. The sign around my neck read, “Scream in my face for a dollar.” The sign by my partner read, “For a dollar, I’ll put another stick of gum in my mouth.”

It was the most beautiful play on an age old child’s game. We started out with 100 $1 bills and finished with close to $160, not that that was our aim by any means. Don’t ask me how he fit all that gum in his mouth; I really couldn’t tell you.

The reason I bring this up, is because this silly little piece has a lot in common with web design. Don’t believe me?

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This week one of my clients sent me an email, responding to some design comps I had sent. The gist of the email was this:

. . .these look too much like websites.

Fighting my initial impulse to pound out a reply “They are websites,” I took a minute to think about what she was saying. In the first place, she was right. They did look like websites, but that wasn’t what she was really saying. What she was saying was that the designs I sent her looked too much like any other website. They were nice, well designed, very detailed and otherwise utterly boring. When did we get to the point where everything looks like everything else? I look around on the web and it’s much worse than just a handful of design trends that are being repeated over and over. There is this sense of despair. It’s almost like web designers are feeling so uninspired, design is following the API mashup trend and we’re seeing some pretty strange looking stuff. Hey, if this looks good and this looks good, they’ll look good together…

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