In a (typically) thought provoking post on Asterix D. Keith Robinson asks if the design community has become over-fixated on standards to the detriment of design.
He goes on to use building a house as a metaphor for web design and says that making a house with a sound structure requires standards but making a house your own requires design. All true. He finishes by saying that he thinks its time to get more design back into the mix.
This last sentence confused me a little as I don’t believe its ever gone away. There are plenty of examples on numerous sites of great design that happen to use web standards. I think design is a misused word in this context. Anyway, I went on to reply that in my opinion the truly interesting subjects regarding web design came about when a spotlight was cast on the point of juxtaposition between pure design elements and pure standards elements.
‘T’ posted a great link on the difference between style and design from an old Zeldman article which gets right to the core of the matter for me.
Style and how its implemented is that middle ground between design and standards. Style is the bit that overlays everything with the vision the designer had for the project and the process of recognising style and getting a style of one’s own is possibly the most important area that a new designer wishing to make their mark can concentrate on.
Its fairly easy to learn elements of design (why not to use tiny buttons or why a logo should go top left) and its also fairly easy to learn the rudiments of standards (how and why its important to make a site validate, how to structure a page effectively). Its in the area of the amalgamation of these two concepts of web design that style comes into play.
Lets not forget though that in design terms the web is still a very young medium. Style, to some extent, is an ambiguous thing and trying to find a unique style whilst working in a medium that has so not even decided on the best way to present itself poses certain challenges. I remember reading a blog that the designer had recently redesigned and someone commented that they were disapointed to see that the site looked ‘just like a blog’. The first thought that popped into my head was ‘um, thats because it is a blog.’ This tendency to change design just to fit a style is perplexing to me. Blogs will always be structured like blogs as thats the best way to present information of a blog-type nature. Just as e-commerce sites will always be structured like e-commerce sites and news sites will always be structured like news sites. These structural designs have evolved for a very good reason – they work.
None of this means that style should be ignored. Just as a house will almost always have windows, doors and roof’s, web sites of particular genres will always have their design rules. That doesn’t mean that all news web sites look like the BBC. Look at ESPN for example. Both it and the BBC present content of a type related to news. In terms of the design they are very similar but in terms of style very different.
How to cultivate a style is the million dollar question. You can look to your peers for design and standards insipration but looking to your peers for stylistic inspiration is fraught with dangers. Reproducing stylistic elements of your peers just means you are doing an online ‘cover version’ of their work. Thats not to say you shouldn’t look at your peers work and learn from them but copying whole elements of others work will stunt a designer rather than developing them.
If you’re interested in style, don’t just look at web sites. Look at web sites to see how each genre presents its content to an audience (design) and how the underlying solidity of code creates a stable environment (standards) but look beyond the web for your style. TV can be a good source of inspiration (I once admitted to a group of non-designer friends that the reason I watched a lot of TV Cookery programmes because I liked the ‘white on white’ cleanliness and simplicity of how some of them were visually presented – that got me some odd looks). I love the opening titles for the show ‘Six Feet Under’ and am finding the development of interactive digital TV a fascinating thing to watch as the designers on BBC News24 et al find ways to present more textual information on screen.
Nature has style. I was walking back from work one night when I was walking straight towards the back of a row of houses. It was a terraced street and each roof had a stylistic row of semi-raised tiles along the crest of each roof. As it was a terraced street this created an unending line of these crested tiles. The crescent moon was directly behind them and this made the crested tiles jet black. Contrasted against the bone white moon it looked great. I wish I’d had my camera with me.
What I’m saying is that its important to try and develop a sense of good style in everyday things. Once you can, you’ll start to almost subliminally apply that to your own work. At this point, between the pooling of the design elements and the standards elements of web design and where style comes to the fore is where you will find your own voice.
Left Brain Right Brain 
Quick follow up: Dirk Knemeyer has written an article on Digital Web entitled ‘The End of Usability Culture’.
I simply cannot understand why articles like this need to be written in such a polarising way. I’m not claiming to the be the worlds most organised designer but it seems to me that taking a holistic approach to design in which the designer learns what they can from each component of the design spectrum (usability, accessibility, style, structure etc) and go on to apply it with their own visual style in their work is a valuable way to approach work.
There’s simply no need to keep up this stream of ‘end of’ articles that appear every few years as trends swing from one end of the spectrum to the other.
We all need to simply take what is good, discard what is not important to our work and produce work that reflects our style and beliefs.