3 Comments
By Mike
11/03/2004 09:55 PM
By Rob Mientjes
11/04/2004 12:04 AM
Valburg
Whoah there. I don't think he means that at all. Flash was a dream, like now good browser support is. It's a bad comparison, but it's comparable.
My opinion on this all:
Rounded corners: perform them well.
Drop shadows: only if it works - my site has little, and it works just fine.
On new design effects: I hope the next one will not be overly used, as happened with the diagonal lines or the dropshadows. You can easily go wrong on that.
My opinion on this all:
Rounded corners: perform them well.
Drop shadows: only if it works - my site has little, and it works just fine.
On new design effects: I hope the next one will not be overly used, as happened with the diagonal lines or the dropshadows. You can easily go wrong on that.
By Egor Kloos
11/04/2004 11:35 AM
The Netherlands
@mike
All the sites I've mentioned in this post are actually pretty good. I don't see any point in picking on a bad site. There is of course a reason why I picked the carblog site to be labeled as "amateurish". It may seem harsh and it is a bit unfair. The style looks great and I love the header image, really cool. The one problem I do have is that everything is so visually strong. I don't know what to look at first. Design wise the page looks gray from a layout / composition point of view; everything is switched on at full volume.
My post is about design choices and not production. I thought that that was obvious, apparently not. And of course you are right that one can't blame a tool for design trends bad or good. The designer is the one we should point the finger at. Today's software does get designers into trouble because the software lets designers make bad decisions, they almost don't have to think. Just because it looks great doesn't mean that it is.
Oh before I forget. It is nearly always a bad idea to use drop shadows in typography, this has always been the case and because it's so easy to do these days is al the more reason to back off.
All the sites I've mentioned in this post are actually pretty good. I don't see any point in picking on a bad site. There is of course a reason why I picked the carblog site to be labeled as "amateurish". It may seem harsh and it is a bit unfair. The style looks great and I love the header image, really cool. The one problem I do have is that everything is so visually strong. I don't know what to look at first. Design wise the page looks gray from a layout / composition point of view; everything is switched on at full volume.
My post is about design choices and not production. I thought that that was obvious, apparently not. And of course you are right that one can't blame a tool for design trends bad or good. The designer is the one we should point the finger at. Today's software does get designers into trouble because the software lets designers make bad decisions, they almost don't have to think. Just because it looks great doesn't mean that it is.
Oh before I forget. It is nearly always a bad idea to use drop shadows in typography, this has always been the case and because it's so easy to do these days is al the more reason to back off.
“The old MTV2 website was thing to behold in an era when we all thought flash was going to replace HTML for building portals and alike. Of course this never happened, it was a dream. All we were left with were those 45-degree angle corners.”
So it appears to me that you were really looking forward to Flash as being the tool of choice for all web design, and now that it didn't happen (you advocate using web standards, but then call Flash taking over the web "a dream" ..... um, what?) whatever designs that were implemented in Flash rocked, but the same design trends implemented in plain ol' HTML and CSS just aren't as cool anymore. This just doesn't make any sense, especially considering that replicating rounded corner design in CSS is far more difficult than saving a quickly-generated Flash file and slapping it on a webpage.
To blame a tool for a design trend is like blaming the English language for the development of swear words, the analogy doesn't hold, and a good craftsman doesn't blame his tools. Photoshop is good for creating squares, circles, rounded rectangles ..... as well as rainbow-colored gradients and sepia-toned images, but we don't see either of those dominating web design now do we? And if Photoshop and other software packages are the scourge of design, then what do you expect designers to use? With far-reaching and open analogies like the ones you're making, you don't leave real designers any outs.