Frank Chimero · Everything Easy is Hard Again

This talk was given on October 12, 2017 at Mirror Conf in Braga, Portugal, and again on February 9, 2018 at the Awwwards Conference in Berlin.

This past summer, I gave a lecture at a web conference and afterward got into a fascinating conversation with a young digital design student. It was fun to compare where we were in our careers. I had fifteen years of experience designing for web clients, she had one year, and yet some how, we were in the same situation: we enjoyed the work, but were utterly confused and overwhelmed by the rapidly increasing complexity of it all. What the hell happened? (That’s a rhetorical question, of course.)

It was a relief for both of us to mutually confess our frustration and confusion, and I began to wonder if this situation was something to laugh off or take seriously. Neither of us had an answer, but a bit of time and distance has shown me that we must do both. I’d like to extend that conversation today and attempt to capture my perspective on that confusion and what it costs us.

Absence was the primary source of my confusion. Three years ago, I stopped making websites for clients to focus on Abstract, a software company I co-founded. My work there finished at the beginning of last year, and after a little time off, I decided to reopen the design studio I was running beforehand.

And wouldn’t you know it? The first few jobs through the door were websites. A lot can change in three years, so I decided to brush up on the latest developments in how to best make websites… and oh my…

Things have gotten messy, haven’t they?

The complexity was off-putting at first. I was unsure if I even wanted tackle a website after seeing the current working methods. Eventually, I agreed to the projects. My gut told me that a lot of the new complexities in workflows, toolchains, and development methods are completely optional for many projects. That belief is the second thread of this talk: I’d like to make a modest defense of simple design and implementation as a better option for the web and the people who work there.

But, I am getting ahead of myself. First, I should tell you a bit more about who I am and where I come from.

I run a boutique design studio, which is a pretentious way of saying that it’s tiny with a capital-T. The studio does all kinds of work: books, magazines, branding, and yes, of course, websites. This year is an anniversary. The studio is celebrating 15 years in business, and I’m personally celebrating 20 years of making websites. As with any big anniversary, you get sentimental about how things started.

The studio began in 2002 as a man (that’s me) with a laptop and a stack of paper at a desk in the corner of his apartment.

Fifteen years later, the studio is still a man with a laptop and a stack of paper at a desk in the corner of his apartment.

It’s difficult to fathom how much has changed around the studio in the last 15 years. Back then, there were no social media as we know of them today—no Facebook, no Instagram, no snaps; most of the sites you visit today did not exist back then, and most of the sites we visited then do not exist now. There were no iPhones. You would go online to fetch directions and print out the map like a neanderthal. We were hitting rocks together trying to make graphic design.

Everything is different now, but I am still at my desk.

At first I was bummed about my studio’s lack of visible progress, but then it hit me: what if I nailed it? Why change if it’s working? I’ve been able to approach a lot of different projects from many different angles, and I’m happy to report that I’ve gotten pretty good at a lot of it! Time and practice really do help.

Except with the websites. They separate themselves from the others, because I don’t feel much better at making them after 20 years. My knowledge and skills develop a bit, then things change, and half of what I know becomes dead weight. This hardly happens with any of the other work I do.

I wonder if I have twenty years of experience making websites, or if it is really five years of experience, repeated four times. If you’ve been working in the technology industry a while, please tell me this sounds familiar to you.

Let me give you an example of these five year cycles.

As I said, I made my first website 20 years ago. I know this because I was a teenager doing the Lord’s work: transcribing the lyrics to Radiohead’s OK Computer. It was 1997, I was learning HTML, and there was one problem with the design that was confusing me: how do I put two things next to each other?

Twenty years later, we’re still working out the answer to that very basic question.

Hi<br>Mom

Back in 1997, we used tables and spacer gifs. It was like designing a website in a spreadsheet from hell. I found this process fun for some reason. Perhaps I was fascinated by the potential of bashing together something in my room, hitting a button, then having it be “out there.”

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