I ran across this bit of insight from a user on site I frequent and must say I agreecompletely and have believed this for a while.

“Print, broadcast, interactive…I think all of these will soon be one cohesive medium. Technology changes everyday. Interactive is expanding rilly fast. UI doesn’t even touch the face of it and is such a broad topic.

Right now I think these things are what’s already here or what’s upcoming. The next big boom so to speak:

Mobile (Been here but will be exploding very soon. I’m talking more than just iPhone apps).

Augmented Reality (With all the new motion capture shit going on, I think this tech will be getting REAL popular really soon. I can see this technology getting integrated with broadcast too).

Interactive TV (Just starting to get here. This is where I believe everything will be soon. Lazy folks like me would rather be on a couch watching TV than in an office chair in front of a computer monitor. I can see mobile and augmented reality being a big part of this as well).

I think designers need to know more about dev and technology…If you can’t hang, expect to get paid McWages. Gotta stay current or die. “

So I’ve said for years now that the process of interviewing for a job is not unlike going on a date (except it usually doesn’t cost you $50 and you don’t have to feign interest) in that it is about two sides getting to know one another. Here’s an interesting article about that very thing.

http://adweek.blogs.com/tweetfreak/2009/05/chris-kahle-tweets-his-way-to-crispin.html

I’ve been getting steadily more aggravated lately with my own field. A few months back—usually the standard shelf-life of any interactive design trend—a number of agencies with high visibility began moving away from all flash agency sites in lieu of sites that, if not built on an actual blog platform, at the very least looked “bloggy”.  Why? Well the reasons are legion, some of which being they are highly malleable (to a degree), they are much more SEO friendly (which research and IA people love), and they have very little overhead; little to no time to develop and re-skinning them is easy. These all sound like great things, and they are. As some people have pointed out the all-flash site is a dying breed (though this is debatable, and don’t bring it up to an AS3 developer unless you’re ready for a fight).

The problem, at least to me, is because of the nature of interactive design it is extremely susceptible to design trends. Don’t get me wrong, design trends aren’t a terrible thing. But they become a problem when they are no longer justified in their use and, instead, employed because some other, bigger, cooler company decided it was right for them. Emulating (well, copying) another company does not guarantee you will have the same success as them and may just promise the very opposite.

We can’t forget what makes a “creative” agency successful. It’s not just a product; a design; a block of copy. It is the ingenuity of the group. It’s their approach to problem solving—their own unique solution and attitude that sets them apart. That’s what clients are paying for. So why would an agency position themselves as anything other than unique?

As for the “bloggy” agency site trend itself, sure, it serves its purpose fine. It is updatable. It is simple. It is SEO friendly. And that’s great—if you want to design blogs for your clients. But what it doesn’t do is leverage the creativity of the group and communicate to clients, potential and otherwise, why your company is unique.

Additionally, it puts function over form. I was taught, during my days in art school, that the elements of a design should support each other. If one element of a composition did nothing to support the rest of the composition, it was superfluous and served to distract—it should be removed. And in the same way, it’s a distraction to see sites whose design seems more of an afterthought or a formality rather than something to support and strengthen the content and the over-arching concept.

In the end, if we all choose to do the same thing, then we have trivialized creativity and, essentially, said that it is no longer relevant in our field, or that it has no inherent value to clients.  It doesn’t take a lot of creativity to say “Well, they are doing that whole blog approach, so let’s just do that.”  This is ironic to me as the opportunity to be creative in the interactive space is what attracted me—and I assume others—to this field in the beginning.