@motherfuton: I feel like responsive design has sucked the soul out of website design. Everything is boxes and grids. Where has the creativity gone?

He followed with a blog post clarifying his position, adding an important observation I found myself dwelling on: “I wouldn’t go so far as to call it settling, but I do think that we are letting what we know about the technical aspects of RWD limit our creativity on the visual side of RWD.”

Can creativity be divorced from limitation?

In truth, design is not very hard. If I ask you to close your eyes and imagine a chair, you’ll picture an object in your mind I’m sure satisfies basal restrictions for what it is that defines a chair, without thinking on it very much. The chair formed in your mind is built upon an archetype, shaped by many people, over many many years. You could design a chair (maybe not a good chair), because all design is governed by a system of rules responsible for its form.

Restriction makes the designer’s job possible.

“Web design” is just a negotiation of limits (real and imposed) over time, which we call an experience. An amateur can borrow paradigms we’ve long established to resolve an interface problem without the help of a professional. Not much skill is required, nor should there be. Design for the web is easy, because archetypes exist to guide us.

Good web design is more difficult to do, and to define, though I’d argue all good websites share commonality that could establish an archetype: standards compliance, accessibility, experience parity, progressive enhancement, all that extra love web designers put into a website so content can be made available to more people. (I exclude graphic style because its usefulness in describing an archetype is debatable.) For us, as professionals, there are intrinsic qualities of Good, of an archetype, that define the edges. The rules box us in. They free our minds to reflect and act on the nuance of design language. Creative freedom, at least in the way a designer demands it, or laments a lack of it, doesn’t exist. It leads to catatonia — faced with limitless solutions, the mind breaks.

We need the archetype.

RWD is new, and its edges are, appropriately, elusive. We’ll get a handle on them eventually. When we do, we’ll be free to think on other things, and our design vernacular will evolve. Fascination with technique always follows technological advance. We’re not doomed to writing love letters to Rothko forever.

Right now, we just have to keep working at it. Over and over and over, until it’s perfect.

We’re all shaping an archetype. We’re all after Good.

Invention demands patience.

Well, If The Piece Fits

Of course, the jigsaw pieces my great aunt fit together didn’t mean to fit together, and bending and folding isn’t exactly what the manufacturer had in mind. Maybe puzzles just weren’t her cuppa tea:

“There is one, and only one, arrangement in which the pieces make a complete picture. On the other hand, there are a very large number of arrangements in which the pieces are disordered and don’t make a complete picture,” says Stephen Hawking, explaining the universe’s steady march toward disorder. Supposing the puzzle is already completed and the box is shaken, he continues, “The disorder of the pieces will probably increase with time if the pieces satisfy the initial condition of high order.”

Web design isn’t rocket science (or quantum mechanics, as it were), and system extensibility isn’t exactly the arrow of time, but the idea’s the same: disorder in a highly ordered system is inevitable and decay is a guarantee regardless of the system—be it the second law of thermodynamics, a jigsaw puzzle, your car, your house, or a website.

Stop Me if You’ve Heard This One About Systems and Pages Before

The most frequent mistake I’ve seen (and the one I’ve made most frequently) is client sign-off of a website interpreted by its authors as commitment to design integrity, when the reality is the purchaser’s transfixed by beautifully-balanced, pre-assembled jigsaw puzzles restricted by fixed arrangements. Eventually somebody’s going to take it off the shelf and shake it.

What will it be then?

Design for Every State, Not the Best State

Whether a system declines glacially and gracefully or fails spectacularly is contingent on planning and requirements gathering, and what-if’ing every possible component relationship across a template family. Regardless of your role—designer, developer, project manager—ask questions. Many a broken template has been saved just by speaking up: Will X-Y-Z always be in that order? Can you support X? What if Y is missing? Should these thumbnails be 16:9 to accommodate video? Are you sure? How sure? How will the template adjust? What does that mean for other screen sizes?

Rats! System Governance!

Every few weeks, I drive by some old sites I designed to see if the walls are still up. Some are in better shape than others. Others barely look at all like I remember, or they’re exactly what I left behind and I just remember them much more fondly. Some look absolutely rat-infested.

Client-side publishing workflow is probably a system’s greatest threat after the engagement ends. Plan as you might, unless the rats, the frustrating little pains-in-the-ass process problems—the CMS, the broken approval process, the lack of a design and content advocate—are exterminated, system decay will onset ahead of schedule. And then the client team will tear down and redesign and wait until the rats come back, and then do it all over again.

I’ve Got a Plan. It’s the Best I Can Do.

The failures sting a little, but as a designer, I find little else more satisfying about this work than seeing a system I helped design, months and sometimes years later, holding up to challenges I never anticipated. For such an ephemeral service, I struggle to find any greater accomplishment.

Any system secrets up your sleeve to share?

Above all else, he taught me restraint.

As a young designer a few months into my first design job (it would be generous to call what I was doing at the time “design,” or even a job, unless the world was in serious want of 45° arrows), discovering hillmancurtisinc was a watershed moment that would challenge everything I thought I knew about designing for the web. The experience was revelatory—Curtis’ meaningful and well-mannered animation illustrated a fluency marked by restraint found infrequently among Flash designers, let alone myself. I would spend the better part of six years studying and emulating his work, frame by frame, margin to margin. Restraint is among the most difficult skills to master as a designer, and if I’ve managed to learn a bit of it at all I owe Hillman Curtis a very heartfelt handshake and a thank you. I’m sad I’ll never have that opportunity.

His contribution to our discipline—and I use that word to describe both our practice and a design imperative—will likely be best remembered by the Artist Series he directed after stepping back from the celebrated work that would inspire a thousand careers like mine. It’s a special kind of artist that devotes much time and energy to documenting the wisdom of other creators. If there’s a single lesson anyone in our competitive industry can learn from Curtis’ career arc—outside of courage and reinvention, which, for me, he has no parallel—it is to resist your natural impulse to keep for yourself what you’ve uncovered through all your hard work and sacrifice and accident…. And instead, just give it away.

Make each other better.

It speaks to Hillman Curtis’ enduring influence that my story is not uncommon, and is shared by many . More touching tributes have been written by others, many of whom considered Hillman Curtis a friend. These amazing people were gracious enough to share their thoughts here:

Hillman offered me studio space when I didn’t have any. He was a generous, kind-hearted, soft-spoken man—unpretentious, humble, first to acknowledge other people’s contributions. What he seemed to be as a public persona he was in person. There was no sham, no pretense, no ego, no big show—just Hillman. His message—“be prepared to reinvent yourself”—was and is empowering. I miss him, and I’m angry he was taken from us.

—Jeffrey Zeldman, Happy Cog Founder

Hillman — generous filmmaker, teacher, designer, bicyclist, Brooklynite — has touched the lives of so many that our exchange is but one. Yet at one point, I am grateful to have shared some space with him. We talked one day of gifts. He revealed he had a gift to bring people together.

I’d always thought how lovely to be on the receiving end of those bringing-togethers, those serendipitous intersections. The playful, the curious, the driven, the learners, the humble, the magical — they all passed through the studio. And too, how lovely it was just to know and intersect with a person with such an enormous breadth of gifts.

—Liz Danzico, UX Consultant and Chair, MFA Interaction Design at SVA; Read Liz’s full tribute to Hillman Curtis on Bobulate

I followed Hillman’s work when I was first getting started in design. He stood out as a voice and style all his own; you could plainly see that this guy was in a whole different class. And after I had read his stunning book, MTIV: Process, Inspiration and Practice for the New Media Designer, I wanted to be just like him. If not for Hillman’s work, I wouldn’t be the designer I am today.

Later when I moved to NY I ended up living in the same neighborhood as Hillman. I’m honored to have counted myself among his friends, and further to have had the opportunity to collaborate on a few of his projects. I always looked forward to running into him on the street and talking at length about bikes and cameras and what we were each obsessed with at that moment. He was generous with his time and endlessly curious about bringing beauty to the world.

His influence will be felt for many years to come. I didn’t get to know him half as much as I wish, but even now I look up to him as a creative force, an inspiration, and as kind-hearted a guy as they come. He will be missed.

—Jason Santa Maria, Typekit Creative Director and A Book Apart Co-Founder

I learned Flash in 1997. I thought I was pretty good at it, until I came across Hillman Curtis’ Flash Web Design three years later. Incredibly impressed at how much more excellent someone else could be, I sent Hillman an email. I made a website—in Flash, of course—that had an admission ticket with his name Photoshopped onto it. Clicking it animated the ticket out and in flew my portfolio. I told him I was still a student, and that I’d love to work for him someday. I don’t remember his words verbatim, but he said my portfolio looked good—a polite lie—and that I had an internship with him waiting if ever moved to New York. Swoon.

That was the first time I had ever sent someone famous an email. And he responded. And he was nice. It gave me the confidence to continue reaching out to people I respected. A small moment that shaped a huge part of my career.

Thank you, Hillman Curtis. The world has lost one more great man.

—Dan Mall, Superfriendly Founder; This post first appeared on Dan’s website, on April 20, 2012.

Hillman Curtis reinvented what a ‘design hero’ was for me. The print, logo, and type designers I studied in school were ‘historical’ and that created a sense of detachment. All of that changed with the web. Self publishing provided Mr. Curtis an immediate voice and footprint in our fledgling industry. It destroyed my notion of graphic design ‘history.’ Instead, I was witnessing it in real-time.

When his influential book Flash Web Design hit our shelves, it was pored over by myself and my colleagues. We admired the deft mixing of traditional media in the vector based application and attempted to mimic his techniques whenever possible. Consequently, he made it feel safe for us to experiment with the medium. While he was incredibly inventive with Flash, that wasn’t the hallmark of his work. We were oblivious to the fact that first and foremost, Mr. Curtis was a fantastic storyteller.

—Chris Cashdollar, Happy Cog Creative Director

Back in 1997, when I was 28 years old and earned a “web designer” title for the first time at an insurance company in Seattle, I was working on an e-commerce initiative to enable people to buy auto insurance online. Sexy stuff. While I was feverishly designing and coding table-based layouts, the dot-com boom was rumbling outside my cubicle. As a result, management was noticing this Internet thing may have legs after all.

In order to gain some inspiration, I frequently visited hillmancurtis.com. At one point, I held a screening in a conference room for my colleagues and my bosses, essentially showing every Flash piece Hillman ever created. I knew that what I was showing wouldn’t necessarily effect how I designed a form asking people to input their VIN, but that didn’t matter. I wanted them to know what was possible. I wanted them to understand that the web could be used for powerfully communicating emotion just as well as it could facilitate business transactions. It was eye opening for them, and it fundamentally changed my thinking when approaching designing for the web.

—Greg Hoy, Happy Cog President

Hillman was truly an anchor and a spokesman for web designers when our industry needed it the most, during the post-dot com era. I loved that his work embraced content and brought it to the forefront instead of hiding it behind bogus Flash elements. His work was simple and to the point, but never lacked creativity. I know he moved on to other types of creative work, but he’s still a pillar of our community and it really sucks that he won’t be around in twenty years to see the results of his legacy.

—Greg Storey, Happy Cog President

The first time I saw Hillman Curtis’ work on the web, I was in awe. He opened my eyes to the idea of the web as a canvas for making beautiful things. It’s not just that I was inspired by his work, but I got legitimately excited about the possibilities before me.

—Brian Warren Happy Cog Senior Designer

Early in my career, I found myself with a band that had broken up and a pretty much useless film degree. Hillman Curtis’ work and his writing instantly became a touchstone for me as a young designer. He blazed a trail from art school, to rock and roll, to design. Not only did he create his own path through reinvention, he did so with dignity and grace. Hillman taught us to put ‘your heart into everything you do.’ In more vulnerable terms, he taught us to put love in everything. Love your work. Love your colleagues. Love your community.

Hillman Curtis is still a touchstone for me—to make sure I love what I do, because life can be brutally short.

—Kevin Sharon, Happy Cog Design Director

RIP Hillman Curtis.

Instead, he asked me to paint him a picture.

…

Now, I like to believe there’s always some perfect combination of words you can jam together whose collective prose makes it possible to talk your way out of (or into) anything—like some kind of Word Voltron—but I was a blank.

My colleague in the room was giggling. I stared at the Polycom, hoping for rescue, waiting for our account manager to step in and politely (but firmly) suggest moving the call to a time when it might be possible to actually hold a productive review. Help never came. And so I described, in detail, from top to bottom, every pixel.

And our client gave actual feedback on an imagined website.

…

I think I blacked out. I came to 15 minutes later, jolted by the realization that I’d lost. Graphic design was surrendered. The latest edition of Choose Your Own Photoshop Adventure was written and I was on the wrong side of the hypertext.

Do you: A. Blame Others? or B. Learn Your Lesson?

Truth is, I surrendered before I ever launched Photoshop.

I probably don’t have to tell you about the waterfall model, a relic from which many practitioners still suffer and one the Web outgrew when the dot-com gold rush ran dry. (You could argue it was never right for web design at all.) Phases with a distinct beginning and end are easy to scope, easy to resource, easy to sell (in theory). And so we wait and watch for the artifacts to plunge our way over the falls—developers for designs, designers for wireframes, etc. If something is amiss, it’s the fault of whoever came before. The waterfall method avails complacency and I was complicit in my client’s client-from-hell moment. He treated graphic design as decoration and rightfully so because I colored wireframes. I put gloss on buttons. I was stylist, not strategist.

I had stood by and waited to be called.

Web designers who don’t UX is the new web designers who don’t code.

Designing a site without some prescription for interaction and content is, at best, reckless—what are we, savages?—and the waterfall method assumes phases are fulfilled before moving on, satisfying an immutable law of experience design: form follows function. But Sullivan’s credo never called for a divide. Rather, the process should mimic nature, to be organic; it posits an object’s form naturally evolves out of resolving its purpose, the way bees instinctively build a beautiful and efficient, geometric honeycomb. Nature has no “visual design” phase. Why do we?

Process, however, is not the real problem. Iterative methods more closely honor “form follows function” and their adoption is a certainty as “mobile web” becomes “the web” and organizations—both clients and vendors—admit waterfall’s failings. But waterfall isn’t going to give up easily, and I’m not advocating we all swear allegiance to our new Scrum overlords just yet. (Responsive web design may very well be their harbinger—look busy!) Because, dear designer, if you’re not collaborating with your IA and content counterparts, you’re done for.

Flowing water follows the path of least resistance.

Collaboration may not come easy, but we are on the brink of convergence and there’s no room for aestheticians. We’re taught to go it alone and re-emerge days later with something brilliant and clever (and finished) because we are judged on individual contributions. Design is ugly in the middle. Collaboration means feeling exposed and vulnerable. Collaboration requires faith.

I didn’t learn this lesson on my own. (I blamed the account manager.) In my story, I bemoan the waterfall process, but in fairness I made little effort to seek out collaboration and I paid the price. Without the small and agile team we had, launching Club Nintendo in the compressed timeframe afforded might have been impossible. We sketched together. We brainstormed. We debated. We exposed issues and course-corrected quickly. We shared accountability and the product is better for it. A seat at the table is a privilege, not a right; you earn it through commitment to user experience—from discovery to deployment—and through persistence.

How will you avoid going over the falls?