Show The Glow

To add to Andrew F.’s comment: in the first round of outer-glow fun, it wasn’t the norm for the average user to have a monitor with the resolution to handle the tiny differences in color in outer glow (and gradients, for that matter). I remember finding Phil’s site last year and thinking, “Wow, that looks great.” And then I checked it the next morning at my old office, on a five-year-old monitor, and thought, “Wow, this site has troubles.”

Yeah, maybe I use it too much. The redesign, in fact, has a good bit less glow to it, comparatively.

Still: it’s not been a deterrence (according to my stats); if anything, it’s helped bring new visitors to my site via galleries and whatnot.

It’s just a nice way to stand out, is all. I find it pleasant to the eye, whether on a CRT or LCD monitor. Some people can’t stand to see it on an LCD monitor. A chaqu’un son gout, and all that.

haha…one of my classmates and I have a somewhat inside joke about “when in doubt, just add the outter glow” and its funny to see it come up here. I actually use it very often to soften the pixel edgest of a rough font or something that doesnt look so good in a design. Gives a nice touch of style to anything, but it has to be soft enough to make a user wonder how you made it look like that in order to work.

“when in doubt, just add the outter glow” - How odd is that! I had a boss who also had the same idea. Everytime I created a print-ad he’d look at it with a tilted head and say… “Lacks outter glow.” and if outter glow isn’t enough he’d want drop shadow stacked on it, too. Man the only thing missing? Bevel/Emboss. That’s what I told myself….

Some of those sites are over-reliant on their background images - without the images, text becomes unreadable due to lack of contrast. The images themselves do look elegant with their glowing outlines, though.