Seems that the second part of September is a good period for design articles.
At first I read this article “Does The Future Of The Internet Have Room For Web Designers?” which stole my attention right away. I was keen on finding out if I should really keep learning design or have a career change. The article infers that the design job will slowly dissipate in the future and that companies will prefer to outsource their content to sites like facebook and twetter.
My personal opinion on this is that web design will never be extinct. It will evolve in another kind of design, being software or any other kind. Once you learn design it doesn’t really matter what you apply it to.
My opinion is backed up by a follow-up article or rebuttal, as Vitality from the Smashing Magazine likes to call it, written by Michael Aleo, also on the Smashing Magazine. The article is called “I Want To Be A Web Designer When I Grow Up” practically because Michel is a teacher of design to younger audiences.
In his article he concludes that, even though, major companies make use of sites like facebook and twitter to expand the reach of their products they will still keep their HQ; the .com. He gave an example of ford.com where they present the products on facebook but always send you back to .com to build your car.
After putting these 2 articles on balance and concluding that Michel is right about the future of the web design, another article caught my eye. This one came through twitter and is called: The Next Level of Design: Being Unique
The name is pretty self-explanatory, it has some nice points of view and some of the showcases are on the point, particularly 31three.com designs; I liked this the most.
I highly recommend reading these three articles, they should fill you with security and creativity for the next 2 weeks J
And even though they use Facebook they still need designs for their fb-applications, fb-walls and all the other interfaces that they can customerize