Web design is not losing its soul. It never had one. See: theinternetisshit.org Noah speaks of a more innocent web where designers went the extra mile. We have come so far down the line in terms of web design - it has largely been abstracted away. He claims he does not want to sound trollish, but no matter how much he garnished his original statement; he is undoing the hard work of anybody who wrote a bit of general code, or framework code. This code is crucial so that we wouldn't have to be obsessive down to the last pixel.
Remember: They put a robot on an asteroid. We don't have time to be obsessive over whether we use Lilac or Purple. There are frameworks for that.
His article screams of nostalgia and is in the business of clinging to a web that is dead in more ways than one. K10K? Wow WAT. We have Chrome Experiments if you're missing that.
On the other hand, there are a surfeit of sites on aggregators like Designer News which showcase sites that set themselves apart (whatever that means). If we are designing sites which 'set themselves apart' we have done the opposite. We have become too showy and we need to stop that. What happened to blue links and ultra minimal?
