What an outdated concept of building a website. The only reason behind using images for text is not having the license for the proper font.
Due to the need for websites to be responsive, hence having the same functionality on mobile, tablet, desktop - most websites follow the same column based style and only differ in fonts/sizes, colour and to some extend shapes. We used to build websites in Photoshop and slice them to extract images.
Judging as a ux designer it is kind of appreciated that websites get more and more similar to each other. You don't need to learn how to use a website. People tend to think more in terms of accessibility and keeping things tidy.
I think the reason was the shift to minimalist design that was driven by big playas like Microsoft and Apple.
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Apple, well… they then introduced iOS 7. Jonny Ive said it was good. My poor eyes still cannot adjust to excessive white colors, lack of shades, thin fonts and lack of intuitive elements.
Also maybe it is because there is now a new generation of UI designers and lack of good managers who would like to push some kind of innovation. People care more about profit than about investing in something that looks actually good. Because investments in their minds are always expenses, i.e. lost profit. This is probably why iOS haven’t had any redesign since 2013🤣
There definitely needs to be some change. I am tired of this minimalistic-everything
The sites I work with are pretty fast.Actually, it should run way faster now, no excuse if a website doesn't. Text and vectors are way smaller, plenty of optimisation techniques available where images are required, CDNs are common, cheap and geolocated.