I'm sure there are many exceptions but a decent amount I've seen is portfolio-driven design, where the goal is more to have something eye-catching, unique and interesting that will look good in a portfolio and to show other designers, more than building something well considered and reliable/predictable. There can be a sense, especially amongst more junior designers, that the job of design is to add some style, and that design should be fun and much more like creating abstract art than making sure door handles are in a reasonable place and turn in the expected direction. The end result is, as you say, more fashion than function.
Does anyone have a design inspiration site that isn't this useless portfolio garbage?
It's incredibly annoying, and i say that with a an interest art, the abstract, cool concepts etc. but i want to see sites and interfaces with "actual messy real life content" not just one big image or whatever idiotic whitespace hell everyone's doing with way too much scrolling on Awwwards, Behance, Httpster, Gsap etc.
It's relatively easy to make a big font, a big picture and a 3d effect look cool, much harder to present 15+ items on one page and create a cool visual narrative around it that both grabs attention and lets the user go solo if he wants to without scrolling two miles.
I feel like a few newspapers were okay examples of this 5-10 years ago, but now they've also gone whitespace crazy.
We need a site like "Real life UX" or "Actual usable design" inspiration.
If you find out the answer, I've also been looking for that everywhere to no avail. Sometimes I go to websites like https://dribbble.com/ and search "Rich UI" but results are really hit or miss (mostly miss)
Honestly? Install classic software and use it! I needed exactly those sort of references to design a project and knowing I wouldn’t find them on the web, I booted a win95 vm and studied it. My designs improved dramatically.
