Are Gradients Great?

I positively see the trend on using vertical gradients to indicate that the page goes further down, and changes into a solid color

Like on fadtastic.net but the background gradient repeats .
On 456bereastreet.com (recently a redesign) has a variant, using a long brownish-green background gradient (about 450-500px height) but goes further down in a solid colour taken from the gradient.

I used in my new design here gradients to make a border around book cover images.

Transition effects I dig.

I can’t create a new design that doesn’t use a gradient. It’s out of control. I’m definitely starting to get frustrated with its overuse, especially in my own designs. But in the end, it still looks great. The trend will die… soon. And to be honest, I can’t wait until it does. Until that revolution begins, I’ll probably keep using it.

Gradients have their place. I think you use them subtely and effectively on this site - it looks nice.

However, if a designer repeatedly uses the same technique, then that signifies a lack of creativity - it’s time to move on to new ideas.

I went through a spell of uses flat blocks of colour with rounded corners on everything. After a while everything began looking boring and tired to me, I had to use new techniques.

Variety is the spice of life.

In my opinion a nice gradient always feel good in any website.
Off course that, we have to set a nice and simple gradient.

There are lots of good reasons to use gradients. Besides the points already mentioned: indicating more content follows, elegance instead of preciseness, etc, there is the fact that naturally every colour is a gradient once it enters the real world.

A solid block is fine, a pattern is fine, but even these become gradients in print as the light reaches them and to that end a good gradient can be the difference between a nice site design and an emotive one.

It is also worth noting that a gradient can be a million different things. Right now the gradients in use tend toward the light, but don’t forget the gold effects of yesteryear, Victorian style parlour wallpapers with uplights, the sky at dawn, or dusk, and so many more.

I don’t believe that gradients will die when the Web 2.0 design-a-like trend disappears, they will just change. But just as the golden ratio will be used, intentionally or otherwise, forever, so will gradients.

Having said all that I have just gotten rid of mine.

Now the idea that people are sick of using gradients should also be seen in context.

Are they gradient sick because of lots of articles about web 2.0 design mentioned gradients as not done?

Gradients are not that simple to make in Photoshop - requires good sense of color usage. Maybe the gradients look sloppy?

I think we shouldn’t use gradients to much, if we do they will destroy the content or distract te reader. I think you can make a good gradientless design. Certainly background gradients are popular, especially when they bled into a solid color as background. I think I’m gonna try to make a nice gradientless design in the near future.

Sachman Bhatti

When we look at surfaces in the real world they do not appear as solid colors. Even my desk, which is a pretty uniform black, with lights hitting it has subtle color changes all over it. Even a white sheet of paper does this with the light around, and I think that’s what is appealing about gradients and gives insight on how to use them properly.

Take for example, colorings. When I was real young I’d fill in the coloring book with solid colors trying it to make it uniform. Then I saw an older guy push down harder on the edges, and make it darker on contours. It made his coloring look so rad, so I started doing it and it really made my drawings look better. But he didn’t just fade everything and if you look at successful gradients in design it’s not necessarily subtlety but perhaps extension, or accent. It isn’t he object itself but through the use of gradients we can give other objects in our design more vibrance, more life, and the direction of the gradients and how they resemble light work to your advantage.

We’re all tired of that reflection logo effect but it’s important to understand why people like it. It looks like a shiny surface…the gradients on those buttons and so on give them a look of being an object, reflecting light and that’s why when one uses a completely different stlye it sticks out like a sore thumb. Like sticking someone in a photo when they’re lit different.

I don’t think they’ll fade away like a fad. I think they’ll refine and our understanding of how to create more rich textures and surfaces will expand.

I trained as a product designer and when I was designing coffee makers and mobile phones a clean asthetic surface was usually appealing. I find now that designing websites some of that ‘product’ design comes into play. i want to make my websites look like they could be taken from the screen and used in the real world.

Can you imagine what we’d be doing with gradiants if the png worked as it should across all browsers?

By the way, your footer formatting is doing something funky (I’m viewing in Firefox), in case you didn’t know.

I’d echo a lot of the thoughts expressed here. I don’t think any design technique on its own is evil, sometimes they just get put to evil uses, or used excessively, inappropriately, or poorly.

Sachman put it well, gradients add a “real” look to colors. Nothing in real life is totally flat. I tend to choose gradients to avoid a flat, 2-D “paper-like” look. This usually means its a subtle tone-on-tone gradient, not a fade between two different colors.

Gradients are also less distracting than many patterns. They add a nice depth. But they should only be used when they add to the design, and not as the only visual element of the design.

I’ve seen some designs lately that attempt to emulate the “web 2.0″ gradient look, but they lack the polish and attention to detail that makes a professional design, and those are the ones that seem to end up looking gradient-happy.

Like the author, any time I find myself falling back on a technique repeatedly, I force myself to come up with an alternative, just to be sure I’m using a creative and appropriate solution. Maybe the answer is a gradient, but maybe I’ll come up with a good alternative instead.

What gradients add more than anything else is a sense of depth. This is evident not just in their use as page backgrounds (like on this very site), but their proliferation in page headers, navigation menus and buttons.

Computer screens by their nature appear more flat and intangible to their users. They are very different to a printed design, which can be bent, folded, handled, flicked through. So a raft of techniques have emerged to simulate depth in web pages, one of which is gradients (others would be the simulation of real world elements such as crumpled paper, drop shadows, and the overlapping of elements so that one appears above another).

As for the question of whether we can expect gradients to die out sometime soon. I don’t expect so. Looking at the evolution of Operating System interface design we can clearly see that there has been a steady progression from flat design towards smooth gradated design. In fact, OS design exerts a *massive* influence over web page design. When did glass buttons become de rigeur in web design? About the same time they debuted in Mac OS X.

Having said that, if there is one rule to predicting the next design fad, it is that whatever follows will be the opposite of what is popular right now! Following that logic, we can expect to see a move back towards bold flat colors.

Gradient sometimes give the affect of softness or movement. The can also give an airy kind of feel, which I guess is the same as softness.
I think people are using them because everyone else is using them. they associated it with Web 2.0, but they are not related. Web 2.0 from my understanding and has to do with the technology used. it just so happened that people used gradients to make the pages look futuristic (another reason). Then website owners hire people to create or redo their website and point to another site and say “oooh make mine like theirs.” I think people will get tried of looking at the same thing and find something new and go back to basics. It is similar to the whole vector illustration phase. people started to get tried of it because everyone can and seemed to be doing it. This is not to say it is not used anymore, but it died down a little.

Many of my clients think it looks more … sophisticated, valuable etc

Robert (or anyone really), why do you think this is?

I HATE THEM! I’m a designing for a major retailer and I think they look dated. They also (in print) do not transition from one color to the next very well. It often looks like the printer’s ink was washed down, as though they screwed up something. However, gradients transfer to electronic media a lot better. I like the delicate balance of color they offer on the digital screen. The transitions is a lot smoother and helps readability.