I was asked to start writing on my company’s corporate Blog, and as a designer here at Rockfish Interactive I thought I would appropriately post about design – moreover interactive design. Currently on the Web you have sites that are designed all flash, partial flash, HTML, java, sites styled with CSS, content-database driven sites (blogs and news), Web 2.0 applications, social networks and the man-behind-the-curtain table driven sites. Each site designed with the customer or end user in mind. Many are designed in the wee hours of the morning, and even some designed by just programmers. “Um…So I installed Photoshop, now what do I do.”

Interactive design encompasses the knowledge of many different languages, programs, browsers and screen sizes to achieve a final product that the client or customer will hopefully embrace and spread virally among the masses. As a designer, when I near a product or site launch I get anxious to see how the public responds and what the feedback is. 

One particular interactive design that I like and feel the Web will adopt and merge into the upcoming 3.0 days is the interface design applied to multiple Web applications. For example, you could control your MySpace page, Flickr folders, RSS feeds and music collection. You could also pay your bills, run your eBay store, manage your fantasy football team, find a date, post a new Blog entry and track a package all from one Web site.

Here the interface opens doors to the designer keeping a balanced parallel between form and functionality. The whole point is to create something that people will use to meet their needs and solve their problems. More and more sites are being mashed up with others to create MegaSites - “Other sites unite…” - with the common goal to allow users to customize and control their content as they please.

Right now the Web is a beautiful place to be for a designer. New things are being added daily, and new ideas are making the way we control our Web better and faster. Look at sites like www.flickr.com that allows users to keep collections and libraries of photos. Those photos can then be shared with a designer hundreds of miles away to create a new site for a client or user. You can even build a flash slideshow interface, lay it over a Flicker folder and embed that into a site for a dynamic picture gallery. Many sites are now designing more user centric video and feed rooms to deliver content when the user wants it and in many different formats, each one delivering the content through a dynamic user interface. It will be interesting to see how many combinations of content control we can design and which ones make the “tale of the tape” as we head into the Web 3.0 design days.