I spend a lot of time perusing galleries that showcase website designs. They exist for the purpose of providing inspiration to web designers who are experiencing creative block. I am not ashamed to say I have, on occasion, used elements from other designers’ work in my own creations, and I know I am far from alone in that practice, making me wonder if there is any originality left in design. Some of these design galleries are visited by thousands of people every day, and I dare say that most of those visitors are designers. Creative influence is a powerful thing, and I wouldn’t believe any designer who told me they had never used creative elements from other designers in their own work.

Design trends are followed very closely by many of the most reputable and talented designers, and are constantly changing and evolving according to “what’s hot” in design. Take the whole web 2.0 trend, for example. Rounded corners, transparency, strong colours, gradients and cute icons are all representative of web 2.0, and there are hints of them in almost every website created since Tim O’Reilly coined the phrase in 2004. I argue that web 2.0 has homogenized web design and is the cause of the extinction of creative originality.

I’m not trying to justify or defend plagiarism, I am simply saying that creative elements are – often unintentionally – recycled over and over, and I see increasingly less originality in web design.

The question that arises from this is “is the homogenization of web design a bad thing?” My answer is, simply, no.