Is it me, or do all the artsy designs out there look exactly the fucking same? Maybe it's the art schools. I don't know. I never went to one. But apparently what they teach you there is that edgy design is most important, that type should be pointy or distressed, that imagery must be complex and heavily layered, and that symbolism has to be explicit.

The funny thing, of course, is that in so desperately trying to make everything look unique, it all looks the same, and none of it really says very much.

There are a few (very few) exceptions to this, but by and large, design on the web is designed exclusively for other designers.

I forget who it was that said that without obstacles there is no creativity. Somehow we learned to work within the limitations of canvas, paper, printing inks. We used those limitations, we explored the boundaries, and we understood the rules. But on the web, all designers ever seem to do is try to escape limitations, whether the mode of escape is Flash, or simply sticking a giant image in the middle of a page.

More than anything else, this whole web thing is the most socialist, everybody-can-give-it-a-shot thing we've seen in probably forever. As much as we as artists or technologists might decry this, loathing contact with the common people (so to speak), it is a good thing. A very good thing.

But instead of taking advantage of the fact that we can now be closer and more accessible to our audiences than ever, we continue to doggedly stay in our glass houses and steadfastly refuse to look the user in the eye.

These are what I see as the "rules" of web design:

1. Plug-ins (regardless of whether they come with the browser) are bad. Work with the technology you've got, and that you know everyone can see.

2. If you MUST use Flash or similar crap, make an HTML version of the site as well.

3. Client-side Java is bad. Unless you have a really good reason that you absolutely must use an applet, skip it.

4. CSS is bad. Well, it would be great, but nothing works the same cross-browser, cross-platform. Unless you want to create at least six different sites, use only CSS tags that if they don't work won't kill the site.

5. ALT-tag anything useful.

6. WYSIWYG editors are for pussies, and generate an enormous amount of crappy HTML. Learn to write it by hand, then you'll actually know what you're doing. BBEdit is great on the Mac, and Visual SlickEdit is good on the PC. I refuse to endorse Homesite.

7. Remember that there are handicapped and vision-impaired people out there. They tend to have their font sizes set very high, and rely on explicit and easy-to-see graphics and text.

8. Step your font size up to the max, and see if your site breaks.

9. Use embedded tables to no more than one inside one other. The further you embed tables, the longer a page takes to load.

10. We're still not past the 28.8k majority, folks. Think about how long your thing takes to load.

11. Art for the artist's sake is completely meaningless. Why bother? Get a therapist if it's that bad.

12. If a bell or a whistle is only that, and adds nothing to functionality or utility (art or no bloody art), leave it out. Who cares about your fancy scrolling layer thing if only 2% of people can see it?

13. Do not ever tell me "site works best in blah blah blah." This means that you are an incompetent web designer. Good designers learn to cope with the (admittedly highly irritating) discrepancies between browsers and platforms, and do not rely on gimmicks that only work for certain people.

14. Test, test, test, and test again. PCs cost about $600 these days. If you're on a Mac, go buy a crappy PC, and keep it next to you at all times. And vice versa. Check it out on UNIX while you're at it. Netscape on a Linux box is a very different beast.

15. Frames are bad. I personally fell victim to this tempting thing several times. But unless you have a really good reason, don't use them. They not only screw up novice users' ability to navigate, they also make any programmer's life ten times more difficult.

16. Monitors come in different sizes. Deal with it.

17. This web thing has been around long enough to have conventions. Use them when possible to facilitate motor memory and familiarity.

18. Simply being not like everyone else is not a good enough reason to do something.

19. Interface design is an art. Art is not interface design. If you're going to create an interface, and call it an interface, then create an interface. The definition of interface is, essentially, something that facilitates humans interacting with Something Else. If your "interface" makes it harder for that to happen, then it fails, doesn't it?

20. None of the above should imply that everything should look or feel the same. If that's what you think, then you could say the same about the fact that there are only three primary colors, and that canvasses primarily come in white. It's up to the artists and the designers to make something real and exciting out of this web thing. So far, we've mainly got a bunch of masturbatory design majors.