The Subjective Nature of Design - What style do you like?

There are as many design styles are there are people. However, especially with web design, it seems that a few main categories emerge.

So, what design style do you like best?

Commercial Design

Commercial design is the one all of us are familiar with. Most packaging design would be categorized under commercial design. Think of the container design of your favorite frozen pizza, or the design of a K-Mart catalog. This is meant to convey the feeling of capitalism at its best. This type of design is trendy, cliché, and bold. From strong colors, to overused Photoshop techniques, this style isn't meant to be innovative as much as it is meant to  try to fit into the crowd. This design says, "I'm a credible company/product/service, use me because I look like all of the other credible companies/products/and services".

Here are a couple of examples:

Clean Commercial

I would describe this as minimalist, yet commercial, design. When I say commercial, I mean that the design is simple, yet still has many components for advertizing a product, service, or information. Often, sites use simple base colors such as white or black. The design is uncluttered and airy. A couple of examples:

Minimalist

Minimalist design goes back centuries to the orient. In our modern culture of design, minimalist often conveys feelings of high style and fashion. For example, think of the most expensive bottle of Shampoo you purchased from a solon. Now, think of this design in comparison to the Suave shampoo you buy at the grocery store. Typically, the higher-end container will have a very minimalist design, perhaps some simple typography and very rarely any images. The feeling of "high end" is emotional, and this comes from the design more so than the actual message on the bottle. However, minimalist design isn't for everyone. Just like everyone doesn't like modern art, the beauty of a minimalist design is certainly in the eye of the beholder.

Organic / Grunge

Computers are too perfect. let me explain. If you look back in history, you see that the first forms of art were cave drawings that didn't much look like humans or animals or objects at all. In fact, they were simple attempts at capturing an idea and making a visual record. As time marched on, artists become obsessed with being able to reproduce life as it actually appears. The most famous painters for centuries were those who studied and toiled to create realistic compositions.  However, along came photography. Photography reproduced an image very close to how it appeared in real life. As photography  became more and more popular, reproducing pieces of art to look like a photograph became less popular. Art movements such as impressionism, abstract, and modern art were fresh and new. Interpretation was given to the artist and their art not only communicated a composition, but conveyed emotion and feelings based on the way colors and shapes were formed. In a word, people get bored.

Now, to our modern age. Computers display graphics without shadow or play from outside lighting. When displaying a block of color, there is simply a block of color. In a painting, a block of color contains brush strokes, textures, and shading from the lighting of the room. There is interest.

When computer-based art, mostly websites, became popular, these solid colors and simple shapes were used. Websites became canvases of perfect horizontal and vertical lines, perfect blocks of color, and perfect circles and triangles and other shapes. In the end, the site didn't really reflect the real world at all. In the real world, if I hang a sign up in my store, it will collect dust, get scratched, fade, and all in all have what we all call "character". This is the same reason that people love antiques and search for old barn wood to use in craft projects. As things decay, they feel more real. Organic design gets its name from this notion of decay. The irony: in many circles, cave art is more in taste than a realistic painting from a great artist. Why? It isn't so "perfect". For the same reason organic websites have gained widespread popularity.

This form of design seeks to add back those real world elements to give life to the design. Shadows are created, dust is added, scratches or formed, all to make a website look as though it had been hanging on a wall for 50 years. Somehow, we connect with the nostalgia an organic design gives us. This grunge style requires creativity and innovation on the web more than print, motion, or other forms of graphic design. More than any other medium, for a website everything is built to be straight and perfect. This is the nature of HTML. To make it otherwise requires skill and time.

Here are a few examples:

Summary

These are just a few examples of style of design that exist. What is certain is that what is in style and popular today, won't be tomorrow. It is the nature of design. Once something is popular, there is always a fringe group rebels against the cliché that pushes the design envelope to new horizons. The masses are never far behind. Another thing that is certain is that everybody has different design preferences. Because of this, make sure that you are designing with the preferences of your audience in mind rather than for your own tastes.