A New(ish) Trend?

Published on March 10th, 2008 in Design

I have recently been thinking about creating a couple of free wordpress themes. So I started looking for some inspiration online and to see what others were doing currently.

I started noticing a slight pattern among some of the more higher quality, recently launched designs. A lot of new sites are cropping up all over the place with Vectors/Illustrations as the focal point in the design. I really like this kind of design and remembered seeing an example first at The Rissington Podcast. I then came across StrawPoll which is done in a similar way.

Shortly after, I read about the upcoming Silverback from Clearleft. This design not only reminded me about the others I had previously seen but made me notice another common trait between these sites. They are all fairly flexible with browser sizes and resizing the window whilst looking at any of them will show you some pretty nice effects.

So, are we finally moving away from default drop shadows, gradients and bevels? I hope so. I certainly prefer these new designs over the Web 2.0 looking ones. It will be interesting to see what other people come out with shortly and if this pattern is continued. We may be witnessing the start of Web 3.0…

2 Responses to “A New(ish) Trend?”

  1. Adii // Commented March 10th, 2008 at 5:13 am // Here's What They Said:

    Yeah I agree… Grunge textures and vector illustrations seems to be the new trend, yet I’d be careful to label it as Web 3! :)
  2. Dave McNally // Commented March 10th, 2008 at 7:41 am // Here's What They Said:

    Ha..you’re right. I think Web 3.0 comes with the description of people making web apps instead of sites any more! ;)

    I think it’s probably just a case of me wanting us to move away from 2.0 that little bit quicker, I’m just nudging things along.

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