I feel like responsive design has sucked the soul out of website design. Everything is boxes and grids. Where has the creativity gone?
An intriguing question to start a really interesting discussion on Branch.
A great talk by Jonathan Snook at Smashing Conference last year. I love it when smart people talk about CSS.
Interesting idea. Basically, it recreates the noise of a coffee shop:
the mix of calm and commotion in an environment like a coffee house is proven to be just what you need to get those creative juices flowing.
Personally though, I can’t stand noisy environments to work in. I remember asking other designers on Twitter, a little while ago, what they preferred and the vast majority of them said peace and quiet.
The real problem I find with this, is it’s hard to ignore that it’s just an illusion. The real benefit of working in a coffee shop is the people. Even if you don’t interact with anyone, you don’t want to be just browsing the web, you want everyone to know you’re working hard and you can’t recreate that with some noise.
But wait…a trend in design where the subject is “reduced to its necessary elements”? As opposed to a design where unnecessary elements are added or kept? Isn’t the removal of the unnecessary a definition of what “good” design is?
Spot on. Minimalism isn’t a design trend.
Brad Frost’s reaction to Theresa Neil’s statement that “Mobile Optimized sites and/or Native apps are a better solution” for retail websites:
It doesn’t matter.
We aren’t in the retail business. We’re not in the higher education business. We aren’t in the publication business. We aren’t in the enterprise business. We’re in the interface business.
Protip from Ben Schwarz:
.module {
background: url('logo.png');
background: none, url('logo.svg');
}
Basically, what’s going on here is older browsers will use the initial background declaration, ignoring the second, and browsers supporting multiple backgrounds will use the second, with the svg image. Clever use of none to force multiple background usage.
Bonus points for discovering this technique doesn’t create two HTTP requests, as it may seem.
Amazing collection of patterns generated entirely with CSS that you wouldn’t have thought possible without images. Some of them are really very impressive, such as this one which looks like a fairly realistic leather couch texture.
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