Dear Smashing Magazine
According to Smashing Magazine, the sky is falling. Again. The web design community has heeled over, and is down for the count. Who’s to blame? The people making a living doing what they love, of course.
“The worrying part is that the number of the less experienced active contributors has increased exponentially. Due to that, I am afraid that the community is not led in the right direction. The true leaders — professional, knowledgeable designers and coders — are busy. Busy with their work or perhaps they feel that it’s no longer worthwhile for them to spend much time contributing.”
(Read the full Smashing Magazine article here)
Smashing, this post will let you know exactly where the web design community has gone.
Time Spent Writing is Time Spent Not Designing
Blogging about design and commenting on articles about design is, in fact, not designing. Unless you’re Smashing magazine or Nettuts, blogging about design doesn’t pay for groceries, kid’s soccer camp, or utilities.
But the author of the article isn’t asking for much time. He’s only asking for 10-15 minutes a day.
“Perhaps we could all dedicate 10 to 15 minutes of our time to the community every day. We could (and should) make this a firm personal commitment and encourage each other to take part.”
Well that doesn’t sound too bad. But what does Smashing Magazine want us to accomplish in these 10 to 15 minutes a day?
- ask “lengthy questions” and provide “detailed answers”
- have “in-depth discussions with hundreds of meaningful, engaged comments”
- engage in “vivid debates spreading from one site to another”
- to “read more than 5–7 design pieces a day”
- create longer blog posts and comments
- not click away and ignore a discussion
- think about what exactly “design” is
- study “lessons from the past”
And a hell of a lot more. The average adult can read between 250-300 words per minute. This Smashing article in particular has about 12,000 words between the post and the comments. It would take the average adult 40 minutes to pour over one Smashing Magazine article.
Anyone who’s ever used StackOverflow or answered questions on forums like WebDeveloper knows how long Q&A can take. Unless the question is so blatantly obvious, you’ll find yourself tinkering with code or writing a response for well over 15 minutes for a single answer that you may not even get a “thank you” for.
Writing an article worth reading takes time, effort, commitment, and a whole lot of convincing yourself that it’s worth it – especially when you don’t make a dime off a post. Of course when you’re raking in advertising dollars you have more incentive to write articles.
15 minutes is not enough time
To accomplish all these wonderful, community-building feats every day would take at least 5 hours a day. I haven’t seen such over-optimism since Google Buzz.
Time Sacrificed is Not Free
If the life of the community rides on our shoulders, where exactly do we fit it in? Do we say no to client work, to time with family, to time away from work? Something has to give. I love this industry, but I want to keep it that way. Engrossing myself in web design every minute of my life would have me going back to school to be a music major very, very quickly.
Measuring the Health of the Community
Why judge the community by quantity of comments or twitter flame wars or the number of verbose blog posts? Why not judge the community by the overall beauty of the web. That’s our goal as web designers; to make websites that look and function spectacularly. There is a web outside of our little Web 2.0 bubble, and you know what? It’s starting to look pretty good.
Do you know how you can contribute to the community of the web as a whole? Be good at what you do. Try your very best to make every single project you take on one you can be proud of. Make inspiring work. It’s that simple.
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Smashing Mag sucks. It’s giant blogs like that that end up hurting the community in the end. They’re the ones who helped pioneer the list-post plague that is great for page views and ad revenue but offers little to readers. And when they’re not wasting everyone’s time with list posts they’re throwing up unnecessarily verbose articles full of theory and false insight that aren’t helpful in any practical way.
Thanks for stopping by Brando. Practicality is definitely a huge thing for me as well. However, some verbose articles might eventually turn into a decent idea over time – there’s just a lot of fluff between then and the finished idea.
Well, I would go so far as to say they suck…but…
I did comment on that article. My point was that as a developer/designer gets more experience, they are going to different places for information/tuts/whatever. I used to visit SM all the time. Now? Maybe once a month. Why? Because I grew out of what they were posting about. I visit less known blog authors, or more specific types of blogs. Smashing posts general stuff that I just don’t care about. I really do NOT want to debate about color theory or whatever else they are posting there. I want to read about Sass, Compass, Ruby or whatever.
I also used to visit css-tricks.com all the time. Now I just don’t care about how to make a form that only functions properly in webkit, but hey, it uses all HTML5 and CSS3 without js. Stuff like that just doesn’t interest me anymore.
The community didn’t die, and that article pisses me off with all the comments insisting it is gone. Oh god what do we do?
It didn’t die, it shifted. The people that have been doing this for a while moved on. You can’t expect a blog that caters to beginners/intermediate level people to keep the interest of vets.
I am saddened that they had to post another article like that. I thought we were done with that crap.
Well they profit from the community, and they may very well be experiencing a decrease in page views. It’s hard to take a plea for community support seriously from a company who profits off of it. Maybe the web and its developers have just expanded beyond the usual list-post style of smashing and envato. Either advance with us, or lose traffic. A lot of tuts are geared towards newcomers, and that generation probably moved on.
Personally, i’ve never been a fan of Smashing Magazine, i ‘m more interested in http://designshack.net/ or say http://www.developerdrive.com/
I like reading about new hacks and new ways to tackle problems, i’m not interested in trends or theories, most of the time they come across subjective. At the same time its nice to see a suppository of cool ‘contact forms’ but to label them as now the ‘standard’ and what not is just a waste of time, or my time atleast.
To me smashing magazine is now similar to something like this http://www.awwwards.com/, pushing for their magasine, trying to make money, the wrong way. Wheres the list of nice freebees? where my free icons? Look at this guy in comparison: http://www.premiumpixels.com/