Good Day. Everything got glossy this year, and I will admit it openly, I loved it. The whole web turned to gradients and reflections and soft, candy-coated buttons, and after years of flat, careful print restraint, it felt as though the medium had finally decided to enjoy itself.
There is something almost impressionist about this Web 2.0 look, something modernist, a style we have collectively decided to attach to ourselves in a way we never quite had before. I have poured it into brands like Evolve Landscapes with real pleasure, leaning hard into the shine and the depth, into the sense that a screen could feel tactile.
The timing is not an accident. Phones are beginning to change. We are seeing Samsung handsets with proper colour screens that can render primitive versions of a website, and that small fact is quietly setting the whole study of user interface in motion. Suddenly there is a reason to think about how a thing looks and behaves on a piece of glass in someone's hand.
Clients have never seen anything like it, so every one of them wants it. It is a trend, plainly, and a fad, and I am clear-eyed about that even as I enjoy it. We are making things too bold, too cluttered, too shiny, and at times too distracting from the one thing the page is actually for.
Which is, I suspect, the gift hidden inside the gloss. I think this era will teach the whole field to focus on what matters, on the single main actor in a design, and to treat everything else as supporting cast. Because the truth I keep relearning is that design is less about adding things and more about tastefully removing them, to create attention and reduce distraction.
So I will ride this shine while it lasts, and learn what it has to teach. Trends are not the enemy. They are how a medium tries on its new possibilities. The discipline is to enjoy them fully and still know, underneath it all, which of them you will choose to keep.
Jonathan Ellis · Edmonton · February 2006