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Website Aesthetic Downfalls to Avoid
Thoughts From a Designer About Finding the Sweet Spot Between Great Aesthetics and User Experience.
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As a web designer, I love beautiful, modern websites as much as anyone else. There’s something so satisfying about a sleek layout, beautiful typography and trendy images that immediately grab your attention.
Lately, I’ve seen websites prioritising appearance over usability: grainy early-day Instagram images, text overlay on the background with insufficient contrast, a flowery typeface that borders illegible, and so on.
Perhaps in the face of AI-generated websites, we are trying to prove our human-ness with avant-garde designs. However, at the risk of sounding like an old lady grumbling about “back in my day…” I have to scream from the top of my lungs:
If beauty gets in the way of how people use the site, it doesn’t matter how good it looks — it’s failed because we’ve neglected the core purpose of what websites are really for helping people find what they…
