Typical can be good

Anyone working in a creative field will feel, from time to time, a little bored. It may feel like you've done the same thing before, and it feels like you're going through the motions. "This just feels so typical." So you try to shake things up by doing things differently, by starting from scratch, deliberately avoiding the way you've done things before.

That's good, right?

Well... not necessarily, particularly in web design.

While creative people may get bored, most people -- your consumers -- tend to resist change. Change is uncomfortable and unexpected. We operate on muscle memory a lot -- most web visitors know to click a logo for the home page. Most people know how tabs work. Most people understand a dropdown menu.

When you start changing those fundamentals, you're forcing people to learn something new, you're breaking well-entrenched habits, and you are putting your visitor in a position of unfamiliarity.

You can try to push past the typical in many aspects of design, just don't forget that the visitor is probably coming to your site to get something done, and they will accomplish that better if, at least at the interaction level, the design follows standards they are familiar with and have used before. Typical is often actually the best way to go.