1st of May is coming closer, when hundreds if not thousands of web designers will change the look of their blogs in by now traditional CSS Reboot day. I find the idea at least odd, if not exactly wrong, so this blog won’t be one of them.

As can be clearly seen, I’m not a graphic designer. Even though I’m certain my current design is better than previous was, it’s not exactly good either. There’s also a wide consensus that I look best when my wife picks the clothes so clearly my eagerness is not matched with ability. Then again, it’s not my intention to discuss a particular design as much as graphic design use and its role in general.

What bothers me in CSS Reboot is the implicit idea that graphic design is just a facade, a fashionable wrapping of content that can be easily discarded and replaced with something else on a specific date in year. It bothers me that this idea is made explicit in the way every blogging software I used works, by slapping chosen graphical theme on every page of content, even those created long before this theme came in existence. This might be beneficial for a company website, where design is mainly exploited to further branding, but do most blogs really fit the same mold?

I’m sure there are cases, where graphic design is a thing of fashion or where it’s the story itself. But more often than not it’s something that not only presents the content in usable manner, it communicates what it is and helps to frame it in space and time. Ideally it would change only when direction, vision of site changes and only where it actually does so.

I don’t write in a vacuum and not much if anything I wrote is of lasting value. I wish I was like Jon Udell and my writings would still be relevant years after they were published, but I’m not. What I write is neither timeless nor does it constitute one coherent whole and it’s vexing that design by its singularity implies that.

In truth, the problem is not so much with Reboot, which even though they should know better only implies values I don’t share, but certainly doesn’t enforce them on participants. The problem really lies in modern widely used content management systems which as all software embodies values and prejudices of their creators and their accomplices, too often rather ignorant users .