16 Beautiful, Simple and Cliché-free Websites
In my last post, “How To Destroy The Web 2.0 Look” based on Elliot Jay Stocks’ proposal, I showed some sites that illustrate an opposing trend to the current popular style. This new look has rich textures and an organic feel. The purpose behind these designs is to come up with different web design approaches that to try to build up and express the each site’s personality. Now, in contrast, I would like to show 16 Beautiful, Simple Websites that are clearly influenced by the “W2L” a.k.a. “Web 2.0 Look” (brilliant contrasting colors, central layouts and big text) but you won’t see any Diagonal Lines, reflections nor “Special offer” badges while maintaining that sleek feeling from W2L.
So, we see that you can embrace trends without falling into their specific clichés. Here we see that we can still incorporate beautiful, clean designs without being a Photoshop artist.
How To Destroy The Web 2.0 Look
A trend always appears as opposition to another. Detailed Gothic art was replaced with the pure straight lines from Greek temples in the Renaissance. The tons of hair spray, glitter and multicolor spandex 80′s were demolished by the black & white minimalism from the 90′s.
The web is no exception. In the beginning, there was no light on the web. It was awfully crowded, with dancing marquees, tedious frames, unbearable midis and annoying spinning @’s. It was the dark ages of the web. Then came refreshing empty spaces, vibrant, high contrast colors, lovely gradients, big text, original gloss shine effect, diagonal lines and, of course, reflected logos, came t0 our rescue. Everything was shiny, with that great ‘breand new’ smell. The Web 2.0 look was born.
But guess what?
Tons of Free Design Stuff @ Dezignus
Dezignus.com is a newcomer design blog and is gaining popularity pretty fast. Thanks for its daily offering of brushes, clip art, icons, tutorials and many more free stuff for design. I particularly recommend the brushes and vector section of the site they are amazing.
**Update 11/20/07**
The site I have mentioned above seems to be sharing archives without holding the proper rights to do this. Please be aware of that and remember it could hurt your designs to use materials that are not properly licensed.
10 Free Web 2.0 Fonts
These are a selection of 10 fonts from the urban fonts top 100, that I think fit with the Web 2.0 font trends. Please click on the image of each font to go to the download page on urbanfont.com.
30 Free Vector Skylines: Vector Pack 03
The time has come for skylines A.K.A cityscapes. I have selected 30 city profiles, from Sydney to New York, and have vectorized them using the acclaimed online vectorization tool vectormagic. Please feel free to use these vectors in your designs. There will be more themed vector packs to come.
Preview
**Update 12/22/08**
Added to the pack the PhotoShop Brushes
Download
Download 3.3M in .zip with 30 .eps files*
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.
Design Trend: Light Graffiti
PS3 New interface for the firmware 2.0
Yesterday, PS3 got a new firmware update to 2.0. And also its interface, sporting a dark background with neon color shapes as if painted with light. So when I saw that nifty interface I joined the dots and identified a design trend I have been noticing since I saw the joost.com site and its interface.
Why should your site have “personality”?
The idea for this post came to me when I was redesigning our company site. I’ve made few different ideas – but they were all dull, and I’ve rejected them after some time.I wanted to figure out what was wrong with those designs – and finally I got it. The problem was that I wasn’t honest – I tried to show false image about our company and people who’re creating it. The site lacked “the personality”. As soon as I’ve added this factor – the site alive. I would like to share with you how to bring a “personality” to your site.
The “personality” is about being honest.
If you show yourself on the site:
- Who you are
- What you do
- What inspires you
