I agree with everything said in this article by Gerry McGovern where he shows the stupidity of most web awards who give prizes to horrible designs. Some of them are good looking but almost invariably they suck usability wise. And I’m not even talking about usability in a web standards detailed kind of way. Just the very basic can I even understand what the hell they are doing? A lot of time, no.
I can understand some kind of experimental art piece but fashion or shopping sites are often unusable Flash blobs. Those are not experiments, they should be usable by the average human.
A Flash intro is a fourth-rate attempt at a TV ad by people who won’t get a chance to design real TV ads. They were invented by graphic designers desperate to turn the Web into TV, and who wanted to look cool and win design awards.
It’s not like we can have the excuse anymore that the Web is new, and nobody really understands what works and what doesn’t. Why doesn’t Google or Skype win one of these fancy awards? Why is it that “art” and “innovation” is so locked into a clichéd world view, which dictates that to win awards you must look visually stunning and jump about the page?
This year’s Boomerang awards are coming. I hope they don’t fall in that Flashy trap again but I’m not hoping for much.
(via mnemosyne)