The problem with the "design" profession is that in both name and in practice it emphasizes the shallowest aspect of creating everything. I'm not criticizing designers, who are often much smarter than their field and do meaningful work. But design has the same problem as advertising (which I've studied): it's an essential part of making things for people, and in fact it's the first thing that many people experience, yet many of the people who study it never get into the deeper, more essential nature of creating things which make people's lives better.

The result is shit like that Camper site, which is utterly terrible design in every sense. It's not especially successful even as a print layout: it's simple and big, but there's not much intelligence going into the creation, nothing clever that couldn't have been done with a long HTML page and a request to scroll, or even a slideshow with several panels. The only cleverness here is in the actual HTML 5 work, which does not matter to any sane consumer. Yet just like Stephanie said: this is a web site that's bound to win some awards from some jackass web design awards group that aims to further the cause of the web design circlejerk. It's not about good design, or good advertising, or good product brochuredom. It's about the self-satisfaction of people who have been trained to pursue a certain kind of "design" that, rather than designing for users, simply designs for itself.

Very few functional web sites are "beautifully designed" in the sense that this Camper site is designed. There's such a thing as beautiful structure, which is the opposite of this, but which doesn't win as many awards: beautiful structure takes its medium into account, which means that beautifully-structured web sites look and feel like web sites, and are often frill-less save a design which makes perfect sense for their content. Google at its best, when Google's not pursuing a bullshit "Apple-like" fanciness which Apple themselves don't actually pursue. Facebook at its best (they weirdly go back and forth between terrific data visualization and some truly odd design choices). Some sites, like Tumblr and Pinterest, manage to slip in some nice pretty design things while maintaining the great structure which drew their users in initially.

That's not saying there isn't a place for interesting, challenging web design which is more intensive and experimental and less purely functional. But that place isn't on a promo page for sneakers, and it's not where most "designers" tend to congregate. It's stranger and more off-putting than the stuff which most awards try to look for. People playing with the pure form of a web site, seeing how to use structural components for non-structural needs. People thinking about how, fundamentally, the web is different than other mediums, and what that means for creativity online.

The web comic Homestuck mixes animated gifs with lengthy text logs with Flash animation (and interactive games) to tell its story. Sometimes it branches out into non-linear narratives, where several stories are told simultaneously and readers have to navigate through clicks. At one point, it loaded a new page header for every strip, and the header told a separate story from the main comic image, which in turn was telling a different story from the text beneath the comic. Recently, a couple of its "strips" have broken the frame which the comic normally uses, playing with our expectations of what a comic panel ought to be by having events break the panel and spread out onto the rest of the page.

That's the sort of design that's really fascinating – not only playing with the nature of the web, but figuring out how to tell a compelling story that can only be told in the one medium. Mind you, if you go to Homestuck's web site, you're not going to be blown away, even though it's a very well thought-out design that does a number of interesting things with its layout. Nothing about the design says "Look at me! Look at me Design Things!" It just tries to house a very strange piece of entertainment as simply and sensibly as possible. Which is what design should do, rather than get in the reader's way to stroke its designer's ego.

It's funny that lots of web professionals pride themselves for being "logical" and "rational" in a way that non-computer nerds are not. We're as bad as anybody else when it comes to stupid, unnecessary frippery. Worse, even, because we're hypocrites about it.