2 comments

  1. It’s funny you mention those 3 sites, in addition to stopdesign i would say these sites, while all similar, are also really really different to each other, and also one could say, the “best in class” of those particular designs.

    The web is rectangular right now because the CSS/XHTML box model is rectangular. Pixels are square, monitors are square, etc.

    You could also say that these designs follow very well in the thousands-year-old tradition of writing, calligraphy and printing, in creating proportional designs that are pleasing to the eye and reminiscent of forms such as a sheet of letter-size paper – easy to “relate” to because it’s about the size of a human face, or the width of a human hand.

    See, that’s why Flash was so interesting, because for once we could break out of the imposed order of rectangles and columns, to make designs composed entirely of Eileen Gray circles, or Karim Rashid blobs, and maybe even down the road go to completely 3D interfaces.

    But Flash generally runs into other issues – accessibility, usability, readability. For example, every magazine on the newsstand today is roughly rectilinear, and while the layouts inside might run from Walrus traditional to RayGun wild, they all use the same media, you don’t need any special plugins to ‘get’ them. The best Flash designs out there now are ones that pretty much replicate what CSS/XHTML and Javascript can already do.

    There are steps towards cooler web design though. sIFR 2.0 is one of them, which lets you dynamically replace selected tags with Flash text, effectively letting you use any font you want.

    And as specs evolve, so do layout engines. CSS3 promises a whole bunch of new attributes like drop shadows, opacity, rounded corners, and more. Soon whatever we do in InDesign will be directly transferable to the Web…

  2. la rumeur n’en est plus une. mais ce n’est pas pour aujourd’hui, c’est pour le mois de novembre au Canada.

    en attendant, apple nous offre des beaux iPod couleurs. Pas pire quand même

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