Preview of Upcoming Column

(Sitegeist is a regularly updated blog written by the staff at Splat Productions...)

I thought I'd just give a teaser of an article I'm working on for the magazine of the Philadelphia Ad Club.

I'm calling the column "Has the Internet Killed Good Interactive Design?", and here's the outline:

Recent shifts in technology and the rise of visually "brandless" companies like Google and Flickr have left designers and ad professionals asking the question: "Is good branding and design an endangered species on the Internet?"

Consider these trends and brands:

• Google's logo which -- with its simple emboss and drop shadows -- invokes all the visual cliches designers have been ridiculing since Photoshop's inception.
• Flickr -- which may own the brand for photo-sharing on the Internet -- but, strangely, has almost no definable visual identity. (I know, its the absence of identity that gives it its unique identity. I'll look at that argument, too...)
• The SEO driven phenomena which makes web copywriters afraid to use metaphors and, instead, has them writing the same stale keywords again. And again. And again.
• The near complete disappearance of Flash driven "experiential" web site which, though often beautiful, have been discarded in favor of searchable content.

In this article, I'll look at the "absence of design" phenomena which seems to have swept over the interactive landscape in the last few months. Are these new brands and trends -- with their blandness and simplicity -- representative of the honesty brands must now possess in the Social Media dominated world of open conversations? Or are they just examples of bad design
run amok?

---------

If anybody has any thoughts on content I might want to cover or reactions to some of the observations outlined above, drop me a line...

dave