Landmarks.

Before you go further, at least glance through: 1. Landmark Web Sites, Where Art Thou? 2. Something’s Missing in Web Design

Where are the landmarks?

At the risk of repeating the thoughts of a few thousand frustrated designers, I think the question is one part silly, one part legitimate, and one part hopeless. In no particular order:

Silly First, what is a landmark? Something famous, not something good. Sure, most of the examples thrown around in those two links are famous (in the incestuous world of design, at least, and let's face it - we're the only ones who care). But they're things that have stood the test of time.

Meanwhile, the internet as we currently know it has been around perhaps 15 years, and only in the last 10 years has it been at the forefront of American consciousness, and only in the last 5 or so have we really been able to push the level of design to a high level as bandwidth and performance of web services have progressed (even Flash has finally become something other than a CPU-smashing plugin for director wanna-be's*).

Web designers are still trying to figure out our tools and the 'best' way to do something. Meanwhile, offset printing is still the same as 50 years ago (excluding the digital revolution in printing). Web designers can't even count on a site displaying consistently on modern browsers without extensive CSS tweaks for anything beyond the basics. And bringing AJAX into the mix? We're just scratching the service. Give us time.

Hopeless Whether you are working in Flash or HTML, the web is still a programmer's game. Sure, a print designer will work will illustrators, retouchers, photographers, etc, but in the end, they are directly responsible for the end piece. A web designer on the other hand may very well never be involved in the actual creation of a website. While current best practices for HTML/CSS site creation may be easier to manage that the old way of font tags and tables, it's still an intimidating mess to a non-programming mind, especially when you need to work with Javascript, server side code, or databases.

Even Flash, where Actionscript started out as way to script basic interactions has lost its roots with designers - Flash CS3 introduced ActionScript 3 - a move that forces Flash programmers to rethink their work from the ground up, and syntax, coding style and document setup changed drastically.

There are very few good designers who can also program and write HTML. Until the two disciplines merge, there is little hope for true Landmarks.

Legitimate The web has embraced 'now' like none other, and I think that we need to change how we think of landmarks. Websites are living, breathing entities (in a virtual sense) - and change as new content needs and technologies arise. A landmark is traditionally a static entity, something you won't find on the web.

There's a little blame on the extreme-usability crowd (i.e. the Flash 99% Bad folks) who insist that the only important design is interaction design, but they have a point that was soundly ignored by some of the more prominent early web designers: A pretty site is useless if you can't actually use it. We're just now able to mostly reconcile the two views.

In a few years, the web may settle down. We may have more permanence and a melding of design and code. We may see a landmark or two. Until then... not a chance.

*2Advanced excepted.