Responsive web design—and with it, resolution independence—has certainly brought web design back to flatness, grids, and boxes. But isn't that what web design is, manipulation of boxes and grids? After years of textures, backgrounds, shines, reflections, drop shadows, letterpress, and "faking it" by stitching together elements derived from Photoshop, I think a return to browser-native design is refreshing.

A couple of things:

a) There's a supposed "flat design" thing happening

b) The path to least resistance: as we're trying to understand what RWD can do, people are doing the simplest thing possible to make their sites mobile-friendly. There's also the added benefit of load times, accessibility and keeping in mind the context of the content — a hand-held device on a slow network where people are conservative about their data plans

c) People are tired of skeuemorphism (see a)

d) It will always depend on the content. Content, tone and message should inform the context.

e) People for the first time are understanding taste. Apple's gift is that they've made people aware of how good something can look, feel and work. It's easy to copy that.

It's refreshing to me too, Jay. I think the patterns, debates, and experimentation are all part of where creativity can be found in designing for the multi-device web. Creativity is there—it's just different.

I think what Naz mentions for D is where soul really stems from.

"Does it work?"

It's a simple question, but I've had to fight to make just basic functionality a priority. I've spent years making what I call Beautiful Pieces of Shit–designs that look lovely but are barely usable. It's sad to see otherwise wonderful content (wtfmobileweb.com) (wtfmobileweb.com) rendered useless for the sake of "design."

There are invisible aspects of design. Accessibility is a design feature. Performance is a design feature. Intuitiveness is a design feature. Thanks to the rise of all these devices, those invisible aspects of design are coming to the forefront.

So it's not that "creativity" is gone, it's just that we're starting to move beyond simple aesthetics and understand design in a holistic sense.

So much pressure to post something here, but I think Noah's long form post defuses most of his initial sentiment. It's hard to get too excited about design patterns when the pattern begins to overwhelm the design. There's more at play this time around, but I felt that way about early grid-based design.

Jay, let's not confuse aesthetic with "soul". It's more than flat or skeum, it's about emotion and brining that into design whatever aesthetic you choose to apply. To Naz's point, content must always drive design—no argument there. Brad, I fully believe soulful design can be accessible, fast, intuitive and above all functional. An excellent website is nothing less. Aaron, I'd link to my article, but can't figure out how to here.

Bottom line here is a challenge to have our designs push the tech more. Don't limit ourselves to simple with some excuse to the features listed above. I'm not arguing to over-design either. Some of my favorite design is quite minimal, yet full of soul. In the end, I'm just a fan of great design & great execution.

Could we agree, then, that RWD isn't sucking the soul out of anything? RWD is just the best way to address the reality of the multi-device web. To me, making generalizations about RWD sites being soulless and flat (bit.ly) seems to be a pretty loaded & heavy handed thing to do. If things are harder, we have device makers (Apple, Samsung, HTC, etc.) to thank, not RWD.

I'm all for challenging ourselves to push tech/limits, but establishing solid patterns will help us do that. Perhaps the 3 bar "hamburger menu" is a good example. It's everywhere, it's simple, and if lots of sites follow suit I think users could benefit. We can always riff and improve, but that gives us a proper home base so we know which limits we're pressing.

The move to adaptive/responsive design is what web design has been waiting for. The debate around 'flat design' being a new 'trend' doesn't sit well with me. The less design 'fluff' to distract me from what I am trying to do - consume/interact with content - the better. A design shouldn't be seen as soulless simply because there is no depth or texture to it. RWD is getting us back to a better web - one where we are being made to think about what's really important for the user in a contextual environment.

Visual style and functional interactions are condensing into a generally standard format (RWD), but the tradeoff is that we might find this shared language now lets us have deeper conversations and interactions with the world around us.

I value exceptional, creative design. I make a living helping designers achieve those efforts. But we, as an industry, are advocating that the things we build work for everyone, everywhere. We're trying to attain order in an infinite canvas.

We're also trying to achieve universal access, building things that work for everyone, including those who can only get online with a cell phone. It means businesses, government, non-profits, publications, etc need accessible websites. Designing for multiple media queries, incurring more testing time, we're siphoning off the time it took to push the medium's boundaries for creativity. Our work is no less challenging. Our present challenges are rooted in necessity and utility rather than choice.

Isn't the principle of Design to solve problems? Now you need to solve much more problems using creativity. For me that's great, because I enjoy it.

I agree that the widespread adoption of RWD has led to a lot of sites looking cookie-cutter. However, this is not because of RWD, it is because of poor implementation of RWD.

Designing a site which is optimized for multiple devices and still maintains its "soul" is no easy task. As a result, most people have reverted to simpler layouts and flatter designs.

For me, this is positive because it means at least some people recognize that usability and accessibility are more important than aesthetics. I'm hopeful that as the dust begins to settle and people get used to RWD, they will focus more on the "soul".

I don't think it's responsive design that's sucking the soul out of our designs - it's probably just us. When we get too wrapped up in the tools, processes and patterns that we "need" to build a site we let them dictate the outcome.

I think what Noah's saying is that when there is so much technology involved the finished product can come out feeling like a human never touched it. And that has us wondering where the soul has gone.

I jumped in here cause I pissed a bunch of people off with the same thoughts a couple of years ago and what Noah is saying resonates with me. (Sorry for the overly baity title - read the whole thing to get the gist) netmagazine.com

I elaborated further on this topic on my own blog (bradfrostweb.com), as Branch itself is guilty of not honoring the invisible aspects of design.

I was thinking about this just the other day. It seems to me that now we now have rules that we just didn't have previously. It takes a while for people to get used to the new methods too so you are bound to get a glut of similar(ish) sites.

You can liken it to book or packaging design. There are established ways of designing a catalogue, reference book or a cd cover yet you still get stunning creations that the break rules but still work well.

Now we have these agreed guides in web design yes, there will be a lot more conformity but no it hasn't sucked the soul out of it in my opinion. Rules are there to be broken anyway ;)

For me, RWD has pushed me to be more creative. Thanks to Trent, I've changed the way I even approach web design. I used to approach it with boxes, grids, and lock ups-–purely visual. But now I approach it from a content-driven perspective. What is the hierarchy and logical flow of the content.

Rarely, if ever, does an artist create technology. Usually technology comes first, then art. It's the artist that takes technology and pushes and changes it, like Jimi Hendrix and the electric guitar. RWD is a new technology IMO, so it makes sense for us to go, whoa, what is this and how can I use it? Break it down to a simple form and rebuild. It's just the ebb and flow of art and technology.

Give it time to find its soul.

I don’t attribute the new trend in design to RWD. The “mobile web” just accelerated things a little. I think a lot more people browse the web nowadays to achieve specific goals with very little attention span to anything else. As a result we are returning to the origins of the web - content. The web shouldn’t be a dribbble portfolio.

It's the design/dev hybrid's time to shine. Everyone has been saying specialize in one or the other for years, but we won't get out of this boring trend in RWD until creative devs step up.

We are transitioning from a time where a designer would create a psd and pass it off to a developer who would then make a 1:1 recreation as html/css. We can't do that anymore and it's causing a "creative leak" between the design and development stages.

This new process is a major headache for companies just starting off in RWD. For example, at work they hand me a 1200px wide psd and say, "We need this responsive." 9x out of 10 the deadline is too short to give aesthetic much thought. I start flat at mobile and work to the chaos of their abstract design.

I don't think it's RWD in particular but I do wonder whether the "best practices" sides of our work, in UX and code, do intrude into the creative side, to some detriment. It seems like there is more "putting things in the right place" and less artfulness or a willingness to experiment visually—a lot of nibbling around the edges, with buttons and so forth, of the same basic templates.

Design, to me, is about the right combination of convention and artful experimentation. It can seem like the orthodoxy of certain techniques are overwhelming, but I think there is a lot of room to experiment and have fun while still pursuing RWD for your projects.

I think it will change as soon as there are plenty of WYSIWYG tools and frameworks that allow designers to make RWD without putting their hands too deep into the code.

Will it change for the best ?

For now, it seems to me that most designers who are advocating RWD are the same people who are committed in the respect of web standards, accessibility, semantic web, web rather than apps etc... because all these are not just "trends", they all belong to the same idea of the web being "just" a way to serve content, and thus making sure that this content can reach the as many people as possible (and probably non-humans too).

There has been similar criticism at the beginning of the web, then a few years later when CSS appeared...

"There has been similar criticism at the beginning of the web, then a few years later when CSS appeared..." exactly, and with Flash too.

This conversation is very similar to conversations that have been going on for years. The problem isn't in the technology used, but in the designer that uses it. Even when CSS was in its infancy, we saw a great many designers creating layouts that were very similar in appearance (no soul?) until it just became a more natural part of the process.

The meanings behind "soulful design" and "responsive web design" are not directly related to one another (correlation is not causation). The bond between the two are the designer that uses both (to varying degrees of effectiveness).

Because RWD is a relatively new concept, you end up with a larger ratio of people who are more focused on the honing the technique than integrating traditional craft.

@Trent - RWD is the kid in the corner holding the sign that says, "Can't we all just get along". I don't think that it's responsible, it can't be, it's just a methodology. I've never advocated against RWD as a methodology that should be used. It's our job as devs to make it work on the appropriate devices. It's always been that way, RWD just gave it a name.

I don't think it's a loaded or heavy handed statement to say that I'm personally left wanting when it comes to the state of RWD that I've seen so far, it's simply my opinion. The reason I tie it to RWD is that a good majority of new sites are responsive. Is RWD responsible, no, of course not. Is it consciously or subconsciously influencing our design direction, I'm inclined to say yes.

It's not about the tools you use, but about how you use those tools. People used to argue that with the accessibility of things like Photoshop that web design was becoming homogenized. Anyone who had a Dell computer and a pirated version of Adobe was calling themselves a designer. RWD is a tool in our design arsenal. The creativity comes in how we use that tool to get the content out there. Flat, skeuomorphism those are design aesthetics (or trends) that come and go. In a year or 2 there will be a new design direction everyone flocks too. Those trends will still have to accommodate RWD. The creativity comes in the shine and polish we apply to content being displayed.

Circling back to something Nick Quebbeman mentioned above — time and effort. Right now, we're having to educate clients about what RWD is, how the process goes and what it'll cost (in dollars and time). Most of the time, right now, clients don't want to, or realize, that RWD can be as intensive of an experience as the normal design process. This of course, can double the creative phase.

We're beginning to move beyond just PSDs and static compositions, to designing in browsers, which will cut the above doubling up of time, but right now, we're doing a bit of an uphill battle with educating clients yet again, that RWD isn't just reformatting a site for many devices but how each device and the experience for each, can be unique ones.

I will also ask this Noah, what sites, specifically, by name, do you feel lack soul? Secondarily, what does soul mean to you?

Knowing your yardstick would give a better metric for discourse.

Naz, we aren't just educating the client, we are educating the people selling the idea of RWD. About 10 times a day I hear "Its one website w/ one style sheet and it is rendered across every platform effortlessly". Cost and time have actually been truncated for this "one stop shop" approach.

@Naz - I'm glad you asked, and I should probably write it up somewhere as I do agree that it would help give a better metric.

What soul is not: flat, skeuemorphic, responsive, fixed or any other style.

Soul to me is the emotion invoked when you are interacting with a site. Does the site draw me in, do I want to absorb as much or all of the content. Do I explore every page. Do I come back to the site again and again and discover new details. Does the experience of using the site bring me joy in every aspect from content to design to functionality.

@Noah - Exactly. It's that hard to define "feel" that seems to be missing - devoid of character, fun or personality. Obviously there are awesome exceptions out there, but I'm worried we're letting the technology/grid/framework/practices stifle the humanity in our designs.

Most likely it IS because bringing all that together is just freaking hard and complicated. Here's to hoping we keep pushing and breaking the rules :)

Then I think that people are misunderstanding or getting hung up on the core statement you made — that "flat/grids/boxes" are NOT soul. When really you mean something else.

Soul can be flat, and soul most certainly goes beyond interactive design. Consider Swiss design from the 1950s and 1960s – flat, and not interactive (other than the exceptions of product design).

Soul is much harder to wrap a definition around. It's something that we end up feeling. When a design (interactive or not) truly inspires how we feel as we view it.

Soul (to me) is more of a je ne sais quoi.

"An intangible quality that makes something distinctive or attractive." – en.wiktionary.org

@Naz - Yeah, that could have been written without the RWD or even the grids/boxes. I bring them into it however because we focus on those so much instead of the other aspects.

@Jonathan - Agree, it's super hard. I can't even say that we've been that good at it @bold, but we continue to try. I have high hopes for the future as we are all just starting to figure this out.

@Anton - Agreed. "Soul" is going to be different for all of us because of the very nature of design. It's hard to define and I simply want to challenge those who are interested to try to take it to the next level.

FWIW, this thread has me thinking more carefully about the things I build from this point forward. I have allowed my focus on the technology to overshadow the love I have for design. We should all challenge ourselves to build with more soul.

@anton @noah Let's start a soulbrothas and soulsistas design club!

:) a blog to posts sites with soul may be in order.

IMO soul has nothing to do with what techniques or trends we incorporate into our creations. Perhaps bringing the best of human culture and our surroundings into our creation is what gives a product its soul.

I wrote about soul a while back: yaronschoen.com

There is definitely a lot of sameness going out there lately but I don't think we can hold RWD responsible for it. I think of it as growing pains. The bar for what a good, functional web site is has been raised considerably. Our job has gotten more difficult.

Functional and beautiful can still all happen in the same place. At the moment we're devoting so much effort to technique there's not much time/energy left for anything else. We're smart folks, we'll figure out a way to make it all work for us :) The one thing the web is not short on is smart creative people.

It seems like we all have a different idea of what this "soul" means. Here's my version.

Instead of soul, I think of it as "interestingness". That certain _tension_ in a design that makes it tug at your heartstrings. I've found that the part of a design that contributes most to this is layout.

Don't get me wrong: typography and content design make or break the design. They do get you a long way towards interestingness, but never all the way.

Here are two interestingness tools that we've (temporarily?) lost:
1. The link between the proportions of type and the proportions its containers, broken by fluid layouts.
2. The Big Idea, or "parti" (naaadjoa.files.wordpress.com), broken by the huge amount of required complexity in a responsive design.

By "The Big Idea" there I specifically mean the visual, layout-related one. There are similar constructs in brand design and in some other places. Those work fine with RWD.

The layout one is currently broken because the huge amount of variables and constraints in an universally accessible and usable responsive design has decreased the amount of possible design solutions. That's why I think we're all ending up with sites that feel pretty much the same.

(Naturally, there are exceptions.)

In my experience, "the Big Idea" and a sustainable site are often at odds. Within the context of a client's budget, pulling off the engineering associated with "the Big Idea" approach consumes a disproportionate amount of available time & resources... Time & resources that need to go into building a site that will 1) hold up in the face of new devices and interfaces for more than 6 - 12 months and 2) be something that the client can realistically manage and update over time. I would love to see accessible, sustainable websites that achieve "Big Idea" creativity, but I've yet to encounter a project that has truly achieved that balance without gutting the client services team's ability to operate within sustainable profit margins.

Boxes and grids, digital or newsprint, in my industry the future hinges on our ability to adapt content across whatever platform our readers prefer. RWD could be our method, but content is our soul.

For me, it's easy to equate RWD to a reader folding the newspaper to focus more on specific content - the content is what engages them. The method (or in this case medium) by which it is delivered shouldn't distract from that. For me, the newspaper is just a user defined solid-state, yet responsive, layout.

The user folds and zooms and turns and twists the medium to focus on the content they're most interested in. Only by allowing them the means to eliminate the noise around it can the they be drawn in, or moved by the soul of our work.

I'm glad @Joni mentioned my favorite design term borrowed from architecture—parti—because I think it's very relevant to this discussion. Also, it gets us talking about capital-D Design instead of a RWD herring. Maybe parti is a component of @Noah's elusive "soul." Parti allows us to illustrate the essence of a design before compromises and budgets and politics and real-world considerations all take their respective bites. We can dig into the design instead of layering crap on top of it.

That said, as @Mark mentioned, not all projects are suited for strict adherence to a "Big Idea," particularly sites that need to live a long, maintainable life. But that doesn't mean it can't be a useful abstract beacon that guides the creative process.

Way back when (all of '09), I believe JSM nailed it (see archives from that year's candy tributes v4.jasonsantamaria.com ).

What he accomplished was a consistency of his own brand, design that was custom tailored for the content, and a thematic framework which was familiar from article-to-article while allowing for nearly endless diversity.

I'm not sure how I would define the "soul" of a product, but I agree with @Jay and @Joni that within the most successful products there is an central idea, that people form a complex, rich relationship with, that reinforces the very humanity of the product itself.

Give the film "My Architect" a watch, and by the end, you'll know what the soul of a design is (but maybe still not able to define it ;-)

How awesome would it be to pull Dave Shea in on this? I bet he'd have a useful perspective.

In the absence of that, does everyone remember when people had the same criticisms of CSS-based layouts? Many of those criticisms were valid: the designs were too boxy. But then we all worked it out, right?

Well, here are again.

This is, of course, why @patrickfulton just registered rwd-zengarden.com. Who's in?

We're arguing about what paper is used in a book vs the story the book contains. The issues isn't if design is soulless, but if it's design at all or just information organization medium.com

Been here, done that.

airbagindustries.com

See you in another seven years.

@Greg, my favorite part about reading that post is the comments.

Related (but OT), I now want to browse old blog entries and collect some of my favorites into a list.

Greg: Can we start a podcast and call it "Old Man Rants" and we just drink Scotch/Bourbon and just complain about the good old days of tables and film separations and paper stock?

Anton: the comments were usually the best part of Airbag and that particular post is classic.

Paul: I could do that podcast in my sleep. Possibly _while_ sleeping/snoring.

What Greg said.

Greg: Challenge accepted. I have Skype. I have rage. I say we bring on a guest and then just stop the show regardless of where the conversations are after 10 minutes. What were we all talking about again?

I think there's no way for design to diverge from a "content prettification" medium. The primary method of consumption in most all mediums today is text content. Does adding concept/story (breaking the grid and box) to that complicate and obfuscate the objective (read content)?

Heads up, @mleland, a design director at Happy Cog has weighed in and I believe it's worth all your consideration in response to this topic and conversation.

cognition.happycog.com

"The artist, whatever his now specialized label, suffers like the rest of us from the shocks which accompany life in a period of massive transformations. Change is always hard to take, but the scale and speed of transition today frequently become unbearable. It is not easy to find meaning in a world whose outlines - and core - daily become less familiar" - Armin Hoffman, 1965 (Graphic Design Manual)

Process plays an interesting role in this. Just a few years back the beginning of the design process for me was very conceptual and art directed (soul), now it starts with content and grid choices (tech).

I don't think it's RWD's fault as much as the way we might be implementing into our design process. I'm curious to know if anyone has ever started a project to be responsive and switched to fixed width because the conceptual (soul) part of the design would suffer too much.

@Brandon's got an interesting point there. We've done such a bang up job sharing our techniques, strategies, libraries and tools, that we think of the technical edges of possibility before trying to push them. Back in the "good old days," it seemed like we dreamed bigger to start, then spent time inventing and creating sustainable ways to deliver those visions.

Perhaps this is the result of commodifying design. Perhaps it's the result of wanting something everyone else has. Perhaps it's a distraction or misstep.

In any case, design has always lived symbiotically with constraints on media or format. Just look at film, photography, posters, books, record jackets, cave paintings, architecture, etc. There's doubtless a way out of the boxes.

Just so we're clear: I really don't think anyone here is trying to "blame" RWD for these issues or say we shouldn't use RWD because of them. We're merely observing that these issues exist and want to try and explain how we see them to everyone else, too. Acknowledgment is the first step to solving problems.

Couldn't have said it better myself, Joni.

Noah, I think you just invalidated the initial tweet. I, for one, thank you. You are all lovely and brilliant, but debates over tools are so tired.

@aaron, I disagree. I do think that we are thinking within the bounds that we understand as RWD right now. I want us to start thinking outside of those.

I'm waiting for a Content-Aware plugin for images. Until then, the web is dead to me.

I'm not following then. Clearly, it's easy to copy design patterns. That effort alone isn't enough to create compelling design. Blaming the patterns or the larger methodology for lacking design isn't valid, and from what I've absorbed here, nobody seems to be saying that. But that's the basis of this conversation. It's like a bad TechCrunch headline where the entirety of the article could be summed up by writing, "no."

I see what you're saying Aaron, and I agree, this topic has taken on a life of it's own. The tweet originally came from me seeing yet another responsive site that just followed the basic patterns. In my yearning (yes, yearning) for more soul in our collective work, I tweeted what I tweeted. Now look what we have.

Noah: By patterns, you don't mean literal patterns in design; but similar solutions, correct?

@Noah, @Aaron: Considering the environment of Branch, I would call this forgivable. This is a thread on a common subject, but this is also an evolving conversation that has taken on a life of its own and filled with varying thoughts and opinions, as many good conversations tend to do.

All we're missing is a low-lit pub and drinks all around to make this a great little gathering of minds.

ahh yess... make mine a fine ale please :)

I think several factors are involved with the lack of 'soul' you're noticing:
1) The latest change in the HTML spec being aligned around syndication of text content (article, header, etc in markup).
2) A general lack of negative (or constructive) criticism. Our industry doesn't have formal critic roles the way art, architecture, music etc do. While being nice all the time is great, we need to give feedback that pushes people instead of constantly validating them, without being dickish or trolly.
3) A backswing toward restraint following the 'death of Flash.' Depth, motion, 'effects' in general are gone in favor of clean type, usability and device-agnostic problem solving.
I have one more but got the character limit.

Arlo: #3 - I was just about to say something to that effect. We're very insular as an industry.

I was thinking about how actors and comedians and directors and artists often don't view work in their field (either fear of copying or just to find inspiration elsewhere). Yet design is very much about imbibing what other designers are doing.

We like to pat ourselves on the back and speak as if everyone in the world cares about what we do. I think we've grown myopic in many ways, which might keep our solutions from exploring new boundaries.

Paul: I think the reverse of that notion is that when we do look at our own work, we need to label and categorize. The more 'soulful' projects usually don't fit into those categories as easily, so they most likely don't get bundled into blog posts or roundups, which are unfortunately a major avenue by which new work is shared.

Arlo: I wouldn't disagree. It seems design is caught in the backdraft. Rather than pushing the limitations of the medium to conform with a design, we perpetuate the limitations of the medium by continually referencing work built upon those limitations.

Arlo: that's a good point—you don't see many talks or read many books about concepts, or metaphor, or aesthetics on the web.

Technique and tools get more discussion and bandwidth because they're easier to talk about, I think, and easier to teach and replicate (and quantify as right or wrong.)

Arlo/Michael: I wrote about that very thing yesterday (to some degree)

Paul- The Standardistas had a nice essay in issue #1 of The Manual about a similar notion called 'Designing The Mind.' All of it goes to show there's a shift toward wanting a bit more substance with our style.

RWD adds new constraints. To fully grok these designers need to work with the raw material (code). Once we're past that phase I feel like we'll see more soul emerge in responsive designs.

Found some soul: backlitzine.com

A lot of us have been talking about creativity going down the drain. I think that is a pessimistic way of looking at RWD. Maybe our current creativity levels haven't adopted the tools/tricks needed to effectively implement RWD. Maybe what we see now as RWD is just RWD in its nascent form, eager to be understood, modified and utilized.

I would look at RWD as something of an adaptation to the need to adopt to the current flock of UIs on multiple devices. It is just a way to make the web content easier and attractive to digest. I think RWD is something that is paving way for a different kind of content digestion system. Creativity would be to break through the current RWD (if it appears soul crunching) trends to innovate and understand the current tools which are being used for web-design in a way that creating RWD doesn't invigorate the wrong nerves; instead it creates a better understood and widely accepted platform.

I don't think that RWD limits creativity in any way. If anything, I think that RWD brought new challanges and space for creativity. There are clever, innovative and damn creative RWD solutions out there.

For the love of Branch will someone please close this thread.