UBB.Developers Forums Community Development Design, Style and Graphics Design Matters Web 2.0 Design

There's been a lotta talk (some just rambling ) re: Web 2.0 , the new web, tha Intarweb, what web design and interaction is moving to. I've got a few links to some nice tutorials about web 2.0 design and thought I might share some with you.

The basic cliff notes edition of what web2.0 design is about:

• Simple layout
• Centered orientation
• 3D effects, used sparingly (drop shadows, reflections, fades)
• Soft, neutral background colours
• Strong colour, used sparingly
• Cute icons, used sparingly
• Plenty of whitespace
• Nice big text

Some BIG no-no's:

• Java Applets (Script is fine though)
• Animated GIFs (the blinky ones)
• 100% Flash sites
• visible tables

As for the last one (visible tables) that's one area I think most forums and other scripts are lacking - we really push the boxy cookie-cutter design. No-one has yet to create the css-only divs-n-peas forum script, whoever does will be leaps and bounds in front design-wise if they are able to get it to look nicely in all current popular browsers. I imagine we are still a year or more away from that.

http://www.webdesignfromscratch.com/current-style.cfm - probably the best article, the rest are also good.

http://www.profitpapers.com/dev/web-20-design-tutorials.php

http://www.vipedio.com/roman/blog/20culture_full.html

What progress are you making in design on your site, or are you still reveling in the designs of the oh-so-yesterday web1.0?

Post some other examples of web2.0 done right when you run across them - a prime example is probably www.alistapart.com

I think tables are a must They won't give you a medal if you don't use them

The name "Web 2.0" is registered by O'Reilly AFAIK. You can't freely use it anywhere you want. Like the "Perl Camel"...

http://getvanilla.com/

hmmm.. that forum shows the limitations of css'd forums - they could never have the detail displayed here with current css methods. Maybe something in the future will improve options. Same with blogs offered today, a lot of them are css'd, but are of the plain 1-3 column variety, not much detail, etc.

Maybe THAT's why web2.0 sites appear to look a lot alike - in their quest to be all css divs-n-peas they are limited in their display of info. Complicated table layouts are the domain of tables

Yeah, there is definetly a trade-off when you go with the no tables route, it makes it alot more difficult to get things to display the way you want them too. Vanilla is definetly a good start, and a great light weight discussion forum. But when you get to such a feature rich forum like threads I think you almost NEED tables just to keep everything well organized. Still if someone could pull it off it'd be a nice refreshing view to see.

Here's the site you validate your web2.0 site against:


http://web2.0validator.com/

ubbdev gets 6 out of 52