In this internet age, it is so easy to create content that just about everyone does it. Over 100,000 iPhone apps in the App Store, WordPress themes available from hundreds of different sites, and the “Links Lists” type blogs that seem to be growing in number every day. Is this really a good thing?

Quality over quantity.

“Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren’t used to an environment where excellence is expected.” -Steve Jobs

Good content takes time - there is no way around it. Poor content does not. I have great respect for bloggers like Dustin Curtis  or Jason Santa Maria  that put a lot of time into every article. Granted, they don’t crank out 7 articles a day, but when they do post a new article, it will be worth reading. On the other hand, if you do a Google search for “Graphic design blog” you will get about 49,800,000 results. Many of these blogs post things like “Top 100 logo design tutorials” and then have a list of links to other people’s content. This is a way to appear to be an expert on almost any topic, even if you have no proficiency in this area. When you are reading one of these posts, you have no way of knowing the quality or accuracy of the posts they are linking to. When they link to poor quality content, it has a way of giving you a bad taste for that blog.

This lack of quality is also very evident in the iPhone App Store. The number of poorly designed and/or implemented apps that are in the App Store is astounding. Apple has tried to address this issue, first by making the SDK proprietary and now by requiring each app to be approved by a human before it was listed on the store. Both of these have had limited success - Not being able to develop apps at all made people mad, but having to wait to have your app approved wasn’t much better. Good apps have been rejected without much explanation, bad apps have slipped through and the process has been a pretty big pain for devs overall. On the other hand, there are many, many well designed and beautiful apps out there as well, proving that good designers and coders still do exist.

So, good content is out there, but you have to find it. No matter how many shoddy imitations there are, there will always be room for original, well thought out articles, themes and apps. Have an answer to this problem or other comments? I’d love to hear you thoughts.