I also remember the times you are reminiscing about. I would go look up lists of top innovative websites in a given month and just be blown away with the moving pieces and interaction.
But...from a consulting and a developer perspective, the marginal utility for increasingly artistic and engaging UI seems to be fairly low from a cost/ROI perspective. If you could figure out a truly compelling reason to spend 100 more budget hours to build that cool doodad and make it work across 100 devices and 10 browsers, great! But truth be told, it is already hard to build interfaces with moving elements that work across the 57 iPhone screens, 60 Windows screens, 10 browsers, well you get my point...
There are still many mind blowing projects out there with cool interfaces though...we did not lose the art of interface building. It just isn't where you are looking for it.
>marginal utility for increasingly artistic and engaging UI seems to be fairly low from a cost/ROI perspective.
This is exactly the problem. The artistic part of design is gone and turned into another utilitarian measurable. The same thing has been happening in architecture, designs getting simpler and more usability focused but they held on to some kind of artistry better than web designers. When we design a building people are happy to spend a little extra to make it beautiful but not so with websites.
But to me it feels like we have much more creative possibility today than we did when we had flash...JavaScript and CSS have evolved to enable extreme creativity, but if that is to be exercised, it mostly has to be in side projects or on one's own time.
But...from a consulting and a developer perspective, the marginal utility for increasingly artistic and engaging UI seems to be fairly low from a cost/ROI perspective. If you could figure out a truly compelling reason to spend 100 more budget hours to build that cool doodad and make it work across 100 devices and 10 browsers, great! But truth be told, it is already hard to build interfaces with moving elements that work across the 57 iPhone screens, 60 Windows screens, 10 browsers, well you get my point...
There are still many mind blowing projects out there with cool interfaces though...we did not lose the art of interface building. It just isn't where you are looking for it.