I've just spent the last 3 months trying to design a site that is original, follows conventions and is responsive.

And there is a point where your just trying to be different for different sake. We are currently ironing out problems. http://whatson.ae/

I did however try to avoid looking formulaic, but certain things just work. The layouts we have are simple and have flexibility. We are letting the content and visuals have the creativity.

I suppose that sums up my oppionion on the matter. The website design itself shouldn't be the message. Its the message your trying to pass on or the content.

I'm personally glad we are moving away from gimmicky elements. I hated having to create big shiny buttons with flashy animations because my boss thought they where exciting.

In fact - some times changing a design is detrimental to a website in massive ways. I left my old job because my previous employer wanted to change the website. After they did, the conversion rates for the site plummeted and eventually they lost a lot of traffic.

Even though the new designs where perceived as more appealing and exciting.

Certains things just work really well, thats why there more abundant.

These are established companies with existing management structures. The owners / management controlling the brands will have briefed in a designer to implement all of these elements.

There priority will be leverage the audience of esquire, to allow them maximise the sales they can do via media buyers.

Audience development for sites like these, is often only minimally effected by design. Especially considering these are established brands. They already get the numbers, they dont need to earn them.

Web designers are just the people paid to put the designs together options together for management to choose from.

It's definitely not the designers fault.

This is purely the result of mixed objectives and committee design. There will be fighting between a publisher, editorial, marketing, sales, designers and tech team.

Each dept. will have a trump card to have there say. Trapped in a false numbers game of milking the most pageviews out of whatever they can. While giving media buyers whatever they need to sell the space to there clients.

The designer will usually have a little or no say in what goes where. fact.

The aesthetics aren't great, but this is because it doesn't matter. Users are otherwise concerned by other things.

In my opinion - the only "startup" in the adult industry doing anything really original is myfreecams.

The media coverage will help them, but I cant see how this is doing anything original or new.

Can you tell us a bit about what they're doing?

The idea is simple: you can watch girls on cam for free. But to talk to them you have to buy tokens, you tip girls you like and so on. So it's essentially modeled a bit like a strip club but on a much grander scale.

There innovation is very subtle, i don't think there's much room to really innovate on this space. I was trying to make the point that there isn't much room for anything original.

That must have been 15 years ago. Most of the industry runs on shitty PHP/Perl scripts running on cPanel powered dedicated/shared servers. See http://www.gfy.com (Now Hiring, Buy and Sell and Business services forums - NSFW)

Most of the stuff people see is just ground level grunts making cheap nasty affiliate sites.

My own anecdotal evidence - when i was at my worst the talk did nothing to help me. Citalopram really help leveled and my mood, dull my anxiety and helped me balance myself out. There probably was some sort of placebo effect, re-enforced by the physical side effects. It helped either way...

Over the years i realized that brain does lie to me. Sometimes my brain convinced me I'm depressed when I'm just ill, grumpy, tired, frustrated. etc.

I've know now not to trust my brain, my feelings or medication.

Talking helps keep your perception in check, i recommend it.

There have been a few ex-googlers who are upset about Google being an advertising company. Maybe they where sold into a dream that never materilised.

Lets say you own a company employing thousands and you discover the perfect way to improve your clients user experiance, the only problem is it disrupts the market so much your company is no longer profitable, so all your share holder and employees go without ? would you still do it?

Siri is a value add to a company that makes money out of its products. You have to own a 600$ piece of metal to have the privelege of using it.

And i much prefer googling - "Pet shop in dubai" for free. Weirdly - companies that do avertise have it much more together. If there paying for a dollar for my click, there definitly going to be open and have the products i want.

But as an email it just looks insane.

The fuss about grids is that they make sense on the web and there's no actual, proper, standard way to create and use them yet. Sure, if you know your way around CSS you can effectively create a grid-system for a site (and with media-queries you can make it flexible enough to support multiple devices), but the fact that it isn't a standard (despite being, as you said, graphic design lesson 1) means there's lots of work to do.

So it isn't really about making a fuss (although for some people talking about grids is indeed still in-fashion). It's about working towards making/using grids on the web easy for everyone and not just those of us know know the inner workings of the box-model, DOM and CSS.

We'd still be riding horses if Ford didn't make a "fuss about cars".

And now that nobody can see any numbers, they can't tell if you've gotten massively upvoted or not, either. In the past, I'm sure they'd have gone 'meh, no votes, don't worry about it' but now they can't/won't take that attitude simply because they don't know. So they downvote. It doesn't cost them anything and they feel better for having tried to silence an opinion or fact they don't like.

Now, I'll be downvoted for being off-topic, and that's a whole 'nother story.

  > We'd still be riding horses if Ford didn't make a "fuss
  > about cars".