Hi everyone i have been reading any of peoples wishes and desires on how freeway should progress and so I thought heck I will throw in my thoughts… remember these are just my thoughts and not specifically true for anyone else.
At the moment I see a huge variety of tools which allow the website sector to build sites.
Lots are glorified HTML editors with a bolted on visual UI and other applications tend to completely hide the actual building process, so a compiler rather than editor,
and from where I am looking these two directions are ultimately the problem.
These applications are aimed purely with developers in mind and that also goes for the compilers… (there are exceptions but not many)
so why do I say that?
just think about how the market has been driven… designs have been visually condensed into fitting specific restrictions and that
- it needs to be responsive
- it needs to adhere to the google holy bible of requirements
- it must be quick to download
- it must have trixy effects like animation or parallax scrolling.
So when a software developing company sets out to create software it will have these overriding parameters in mind. A software developer has to have in mind that a user needs to create the above list or a software developer creating a compiler has to make sure that the code which is spat out on a publishing cycle can again adhere to the above list… no wander all the sites are looking the same… so little of the applications abilities has anything to do with real creative flexibility.
So many designers are brainwashed into thinking we need to use a 12 column grid here or a 16 column grid there blah blah blah and so the software direction reflects that.
You can see this to be true because all you need to do is open up the million and one templates which are available… You choose your grid and you choose your colours which of course are already specified from the google materials list etc… its all the same.
You know… the big hero image or slider, then a centered main strap-line, followed by sub-heading and that’s usually centered as well around a middle section, which contains three blocks and that’s because research has indicated people like un-even numbers, then we have another horizontal block containing bullet points and that’s all topped and tailed with a hamburger and a large footer of multiple columns … Do you recognise this design…zzz zzz
It’s not that I haven’t used ALL of the above… I have and I hate it. So what’s the answer? I don’t know but I do know, generally, sites are visually BOOOOORING.
What has given me hope though, was working with a designer in Spain, she contacted me because she needed some help on converting some of her sites for her clients so they could be made responsive.
The resulting designs have made me think… I mean really think about how the heck I was going to make those designs responsive none of those designs would fit a grid or standard. What it has shown me is that Freeways approach of construction actually didn’t hold me back as much as you may think. in fact, it worked much much better than many of the other software because freeway comes from a time in which you could design what you liked… it has the ability to be freeform.
So for me, its not so much if freeway can catch up with all the competition, but more: can the new freeway expand on allowing me to build what I want to design
Remember these are just my thought… not gospel
Max
freewaytalk mailing list
email@hidden
Update your subscriptions at: