Forget professional design, I want businesses to have personality

Having a professional image is very important for brands, but it’s just the next step from having an unprofessional image. It’s a great goal to have for a website that looks bad, has dated design or doesn’t work, but should not being mediocre be the end goal? Why not go further? Forget professional design, I want businesses to have personality.

A professional website is neutral. It’s not bad, but it’s not great either. It gets the job done and, honestly, for a lot of businesses that’s fine, they don’t need more.

But there are brands and people out there that have a lot to say, a lot of personality, a lot of potential. These are the brands that want to stand out, be unique, be themselves, be human. And these should not get stuck on trying to look professional, because they will look like anyone else.

It seems as if the term “professional” is an antonym for “personal”. But does being professional mean being less of a person? No. Being professional is NOT incompatible with being human, authentic and fun. And I believe that in times when all design seems to be the same, there’s a lot of potential in showing humanness, personality, fun and originality.

To illustrate my points and show some visual examples, here are some designs that are professional but also AUTHENTIC. These are websites that include the person or brand's personality in their design, in various degrees.

Cody Cook-Parrot's website is clean, easy to navigate, professional, but it doesn't just stop at that. It also has personality, color, originality. You already get a sense of Cody's values, style and uniqueness, even before reading about their work.

Jackie Liu's website feels just like her work: playful, fun, interactive. It's a great example of integrating art and platform, because why shouldn't the website also be part of the art?!

Talking about making the website also art, Lexi Ho-Tai's website is another great example of that. I've never seen an artist's website so uniquely crafted and connected to their work. This website is so expressive and so authentic, which is a thousand times better than if was only "professional".

I get that these websites are creative and original partly because they're artists' websites, so this next example is of a restaurant's website.

Cong's website is just one page and doesn't have a lot of text, yet its creative layout achieves three different things very well: it communicates the important information, shows the food you'll find there, and conveys the restaurant's vibe.

What all these websites have in common isn't just that they're creative, original or fun, they all share one common trait: humanness. Fun headshot photography, games based on personal stories, handmade website buttons, real and raw photography… All of these things make these websites unique to their owners, and their humanness connects much more than "professionalism" ever could.