What fills the Web Design Hall of Fame? Google? Amazon? MySpace? Undress Me Robot? Each website would pass for inclusion on some basis, but inevitably fail on another. While print and other media have a solid canon of wholly successful designs, the web seems to be lacking. Armin Vit over at Speak Up asks us, "Landmark web sites, where art thou?" His short discussion does not offer any answers, instead simply spotlighting the dearth and turning to the masses for salvation.

Perhaps it's the short lifespan of the web that hasn't allowed any specific web site to become a de facto choice for design immortality; but Seven was released in 1995, becoming an instant classic, so age is not quite an issue. Or maybe it's the perennially ephemeral nature of the web, where web sites can change every year, month or week if desired, rendering the sense of commitment less ominous than that of printed or branded matter. It could also be the giant amount of crap that one has to wade through on the internet, but not much more than the amount of bad logos, brochures or signs found day in and day out. Or maybe I'm just thinking about this the wrong way.

So Vit is hard-pressed to find a cause for the web's lack of such great heights. Here he knocks down possible sources of this dearth, and later he knocks down certain sites' inclusion in the Hall of Fame. (Google may be a great search engine, but default blue links and bevel and drop shadow logo? For shame!) For any hypothesis on the cause of the web's impotency, we'll have to turn to Khoi Vinh's argument that the web lacks great designers who both think and do. My question to Vinh is this: why is this true only for web design? It is tempting to restrict your vision to only web design, but I find it extremely hard to believe that great print designers are not also graduating to managerial positions.

Then again, maybe Vit is thinking about this the wrong way. At the very least, his logic seems a bit inconsistent when dismissing the age of the web as a non-factor. Certainly, a genuinely classic design could be recognized as such within days or weeks of its creation (as in Seven), so it is not that the web has not been around long enough for people to recognize a web design's success. However, Seven was released almost a century after the inception of motion pictures, and its opening does not utilize any techniques significantly different than what was available in the previous decades. The world wide web (not the Internet), on the other hand, is like a baby. At most just a bit over a decade old, web technologies are still in early development. Hell, even half of what you find on the web today was impossible five or ten years ago.

While age of the medium is hardly necessary for a design to be considered a masterpiece, it is very influential when considering what the medium can do. Are we yet at a point where web designers can create a site as beautiful as the best Flash website, but as usable and functional as Google? Cascading style sheets bring us very close, Javascript and PHP (and the like) even closer, but I would argue that we are not quite there yet. It will be a couple more years until designers have fully stretched the boundaries of today's emerging tools.

But should we even try to apply conventional graphical design to web design? Joshua Porter prevails upon us to recognize the web as a different beast, and act accordingly. However, as Jeff Croft points out in the comments, Porter is concerned entirely with interaction design. Google, Amazon, Craigslist, and eBay are all very usable, but they lack any stunning aesthetics (though Amazon's recent redesign has brought the site closer to Vit's Pinnaclism). Assumedly, Porter would also see the conventional dictionary as a design success, with its extreme ease of use, but can we really lump it together with Massimo Vignelli's New York subway map?

Vit would reply with a resounding NO. How a user accesses and interacts with data are important aspects of design, but how that data is displayed is just as important:

When it comes to web design it's rare that all elements -- functionality, clarity of information, and subjective beauty -- come together to create a result that is widely admired, recognized or lauded in the same vein as anything resembling the likes of Saul Bass' AT&T logo, or Susan Kare's icons for the original Mac OS.

I think web designers are still grappling with how to handle both data and aesthetics. Dynamic websites and visually appealing websites are both relatively new phenomena, each still coming into their own. This all goes back to Mark Boulton's point that separating content and presentation has led to cookie-cutter websites [1]. When dealing with small website of just a few pages stunning, unique examples definitely already exist, and I think Vit will be satisfied once designers are able to take that beauty and create something that is both expansive (handling large amounts of variable content) and exquisite.

[1] Don't you hate when you incriminate yourself?