Style versus design
Designers driven by Style can succeed if they are lucky enough to pick and choose projects that benefit from their stylistic obsessions. Most web designers do not have that luxury. But that doesn't stop them from applying the stylistic vocabulary of leading designers to the projects they do have to work on. And so we end up with e-commerce sites that resemble rave flyers, and informational sites embellished with occasionally dazzling but more frequently misguided and inappropriate intros.
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Zeldman's article from 1999, updated in 2005, recently got some attention again as being up to date as in the year of its publication. Fortunately, I think it's now obsolete and the web has moved on. And all that thanks to the impassionate power of money. Clients now expect return from their investments and websites that don't meet down-to-earth goals go out of business.
