I agree with what Anna says. Design is a trend much like fashion or the enonomic landscape of today. Social media is driving common practice in web designers much like propaganda did for recruiting soldiers back in WW2. We as designers are trend followers. We look for inspiration on the net and find it in design galleries, showcases and more. We learn techniques from magazine site such as smashingmagazine.com & psdtuts. I can honestly say I’m hugely influenced by others with regards to design and methods. I’ve learned more in the last 3 – 4 months through tutorials etc then I did in the previous 3 years I’ve been involved in web design.

I love the back and forth arguments and integrated quotes from the design sites you read. Any decent web designer worth their salt, or worth keeping their job at X consulting agency or other, should stay on top of whats happening online with either social design, blogging, new technologies, new ways to get users to pay attention to what they need to pay attention to, current design style to attract and retain folks, new testing methods, etc.

At the IA Summit in Las Vegas this past March (http://www.earthspiral.com/blog/?p=41) I loved Stephen P. Anderson’s poster presentation (http://www.poetpainter.com/thoughts/article/ia-summit-2007-tasks-to-experiences-poster) and I have a component of this on my cube wall staring at me when I work on my laptop and I absolutely love it. There is a pyramidal structure (think Maslow’s pyramid of needs) and from top to bottom it reads to make experiences be: meaningful, pleasurable, convenient, usable, reliable, functional. Functional/useful being the ground level of this pyramid. I strive to make these parts when thinking about designing anything.

I know I am one lucky designer to be working in the iLab since I don’t have a one-dimensional design job like I used to have when I was a consultant creating visual designs for Fortune 500 companies. BUT, no matter what your design title or what you do in the design field these days, it is only a matter of time till you are extinct as a dinosaur if you don’t keep up with the social times and really focus in on giving your end-users the best possible experience they can have online. How you end up doing this varies for every project, and every project is different. A successful web designer in 2008 should be three or four dimensional, think a step ahead, know your users inside and out, experiment and test every option with PASSION FOR THE END USER, so your work at the end of the day is a PINNACLE even though it will change and morph with the times. As every good web site should!

That said, every project is a challenge, but a very rewarding challenge if you think strategically “what” and not just tactics “how.”
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