Who's driving?

I've been to a few Microsoft events recently featuring WPF, Expression tools and Silverlight which have really had me questioning approaches to projects. Its kind of irritating and fantastic at the same time when new methods and technologies come up. I remember how my confidence blossomed when I finally mastered HTML tables. There wasn't any layout I couldn't attempt. If faced with a third party site, I could be confident that Id work out how the site had been built. Then along came improved browser support for CSS 2. Suddenly my world was turned upside down. It took me ages to build a site using CSS for the layout. So often I wanted to throw it all in, knowing I could achieve a result in no time using tables. The font re-sizing, liquid, elastic sites came to the fore. Suddenly I had to pour hours into a site that wouldn't completely break if the visitor increased the font size from the browsers. It seems as if I've had to change technique and approach a gazillion times in the last few years and the rules are more ambiguous than ever.

So where does design stand with all these changes occurring? I sometimes question my role - do I design sites or do I build pages? If course I do both, but so often I find myself falling for that dangerous pitfall - designing for the medium rather than designing for the solution. When I was at University, our tutors adamantly used to tell us not to be constrained by the process used to realise a design solution. I could totally see where they were coming from. I struggled back then to get to grips with Quark on the Mac and consequently my designs did suffer. I did much of my work by hand but knew that the results would suffer against the polished results other students could achieve from the Mac. So I would play safe and design something I felt confident I could produce. This often strikes me when I design websites today. Now obviously we are all constrained by time and budget and rarely have the luxury of having hours to pour over a design - we have to get things out of the door. This also contributes to the 'playing safe' strategy. We stick to the tried and tested but don't always question whether its the most effective, user friendly solution.

So now WPF and Silverlight are looming closer and rules could change again. Potentially these technologies could offer more design flexibility, more opportunities. Of course, this can mean more ways to go off the rails(!) but it would seem that it could give web application design another kick. Perhaps we can start approaching problems in inventive ways that could aid usability and experience rather than constraining ourselves to tried and tested methods.