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When Less Isn’t Less

By michael on February 2nd, 2006.

A while ago I read an article in Wired about a traffic engineer who removed all the traffic signs from a village in Holland. No street signs, no lane markers, no crosswalks, not even markers to indicate where the road stops and sidewalks begin. …

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Busting Out!

By Marc Bernstein on October 22nd, 2005.

A fairly new trend making it’s way around town is the Busting Out! design. This trend consists of a design that is breaking out of the borders of the website. The header banner is usually the culprit, and contains an element of it that goes beyond the …

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Worn Out , Grunge, Vintage…

By Marc Bernstein on October 17th, 2005.

Worn Out, Grunge, Vintage… Call it what you want the idea is the same: take a design and few custom made photoshop brushes and go wild. The result is a design that looks vintage and worn out.

(Check out the well written tutorial by Cameron Moll to achieve this …

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Designing with Food Groups

By Marc Bernstein on October 13th, 2005.

Something I’ve noticed appearing on a few sites lately is images of food for no apparent reason than design touches. Granted, if you are viewing a restaurant, food magazine, or wholesaler you’d expect to see these images - but what about Blogs, design firms, and businesses not related …

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Holding A Design Together

By Andrew Faulkner on October 6th, 2005.

A recent trend has seen designers use their abilities to reproduce paper effects, often used as background for content areas or as ‘Polaroid’ effects for images. Designers competed to get the most realistic paper effect and now the showcase sites are showing them - realising the amount of effort that …

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Something stripes me as odd…

By Phil Renaud on October 4th, 2005.

Forgive the horrendousness of the pun in the title, but there is a web trend that appears to be expanding, and I can’t think of anything more fitting.

Remember before the G8 summit this summer, when the Make Poverty History campaign was at it’s highest peak of popularity? Live8 …

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Cutting it out

By Andrew Faulkner on September 21st, 2005.

We all love a new trend. I know I do. Correct me if I’m wrong but I think this one’s fairly new.

‘Cutting it out’ does exactly what is says on the tin. Elements (usually stickers, titles or banners) are only partly shown in a browser window.

Normally as an …

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Outer Shadow on Site Containers

By Andrew Faulkner on September 19th, 2005.

Outer shadows are obviously back in fashion after a stint in oblivion. For those not in the know, these (now overused) details used to be found on graphical elements like buttons, stickers and so on. However, the new wave of slick designs have adopted them for use on site ‘containers.’ …

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Design over content, or is it content over design?

By Gavin on September 16th, 2005.

Recently there’s been an uproar over where we should position our site’s navigation. Should we be scolded for trying alternative methods; for it alienates our readers and possibly gives them travel sickness? Well I’d like to present my view of the trend we seem to be experiencing …

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Fading-Out Containers

By Andrew Faulkner on September 14th, 2005.

Drop-shadows are a staple web design technique used most often to make otherwise flat, boring containers appear more interesting and realistic. They’re all over the web, especially blogs, giving them depth and variation. So I won’t call them a fad. However, another method for creating interesting looking containers …

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