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Out of context: Reply #45
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'Strikes me that a lot of these beloved grandiose showcase sites from yesteryear indicate more an industry struggling to come to terms with an entirely new medium, rather than a contemporary drop in creativity.'
Not entirely sure about this. You could also interpret it as a sort of Marketing Communication v Tech-Focused Web fight.
For ages, the Web was all about informational websites, without any sort of entertainment value ... Jakob Nielsen's wet dream, really. It was conceived by geeks, run by geeks ('webmasters'!) and the geeks often dismissed the inherent creative possibilities. In those days, one _built_ websites, one didn't _create_ communication concepts using the Web and all of its fun tech as a medium.
Enter the agencies, who have a go at making it entertaining and engaging, and so we get all of those really cool showcase sites.
The problem is, the geeks got to the Web first before the agencies did, and hammered on and on and on about things like low image overhead, usability, grids and all of the things Nielsen's band of Zombie Interweb Gestapo managed to convince the broader internet-using public were Good Things.
The death of Flash is part of that battle, in a sense; Nielsen and his gang of anti-design thugs went on and on about how bad Flash is, and a lot of his old arguments came back as Flash was on its last leg, and Steve Jobs gave it the finger.
So now, it's back to a Web for geeks. WordPressing and Bootstrapping geeks, but geeks all the same. With any luck, technology will develop in such a way that the common platforms can offer something in the way of creative latitude in the same way Flash did.