How to Find Balance Between Boring and Innovative
Convention and creativity seem to be at odds in design, but they each have a role to play
The year was 2011, and Twitter, unsatisfied with having merely built a product that would eventually reveal the possible horrors of social media, decided to unleash something called “Bootstrap” onto an unsuspecting developer world. The “hero image” was born, and shortly thereafter creativity filed for a leave of absence.
In fairness to Bootstrap, it never intended to suburbanize the web. It provided an excellent (for the time) framework that dealt effectively with many of CSS’s shortcomings and gave developers tools to rapidly build websites with a clean and modern aesthetic. It was the ibuprofen and Gatorade to our collective Web 2.0 hangover.
Website templates had existed since time immemorial, but Bootstrap became the de facto web template for everyone. Early on it seemed innocuous, at worst the beginning of yet another web trend, but as it rose in ubiquity something unintended started to happen: Every website began to look the same.
In the midst of this turn toward branded interchangeability, a new and still relevant conversation began to form around the merits of creative and distinctive user interfaces vs. the utilitarian benefits…
