There are many differing schools of design out there, and in this article, I will look at the British, US, and German/Swiss schools of web design from a critical perspective. I have a fair amount of experience with each one of these varying approaches as I also have my own favourites. Without a doubt, my own preconceptions will colour this article – but then this is unavoidable – and perhaps even desirable.
Both in terms of visual and written content, the British approach tends to be the most baroque and rococo – with lavish embellishments and dressings vying to spin a yarn of exclusivity. The British approach tends to be highly conceptual, focused on spin, and geared towards mental massage.
Of course, the U.K. does not possess an indigenous and endemic web design school. What we witness in the UK is the extension of the printing craft and industry into the web medium. Consequently in the UK, the web medium carries excess print-baggage.
The origins of the desire to be exclusive could be coming from the glaring disparity between the abject and despicable poverty on the one hand, and the gluttonous exclusive royal glamour on the other. The UK is where Marx wrote Das Kapital. In Victorian UK, the extreme disparity between rich and poor probably created a desire for belonging to the ‘exclusive’ – albeit be it, for the poor, only an escape into a fantasy world. Nice ornamental designs could have served as a means for escape.
The UK approach has been successful at transplanting print designs to the web medium. This is no easy feat. The web medium is and remains in essence antithetical to print. The differences between print and web media are well documented, and constitute the ’101′ of any web design course in the US. But in the UK, if you talk about the difference between web and print, you are likely to get many injurious looks.
In recent years, with the advent of Web 2.0, UK web design has been moving towards the US approach, and it will be interesting to see how the UK web design approach will respond to accommodate its print background as well as the newer US ideas.
