Bland and Grand Web Design

One of the greatest aspects about the Web is that it's such an open platform, especially for design. The accessibility and freedom of the Web allows designers to do some very nice-looking things, and it allows for experimentation and interpretation. Unfortunately, it also allows for some very bland-looking things, too. Let's take a look at some bland designs and some grand designs, and take a peek at what makes them that way.

A few things to keep in mind before we continue. It doesn't matter if a web design is bland and tasteless or grand and stunning; only designs that are functional and coherent are in this article. For the bland web designs, I didn't want to show designs that are obviously terrible. Instead, I wanted to show designs that serve as websites with some actual merit, but could stand some improvement on the visual, functional, or coding side of things. It's easy to find designs that are just completely bad, so I won't be covering them here. But, if you'd like to see some, there's a site that focuses on them.

Likewise, it's fairly easy to find designs that look beautiful. But this doesn't always mean they are functional or well-coded, or even have anything else going for them besides good looks. Instead of focusing on these purely beautiful sites, then, in this article I hope to showcase some that are pleasing visually and elegantly handled in both functionality and coding, and try to point out why they're grand.