Why CSS Galleries no longer work
I know what you are going to say, and yes. Hypocrisy, thy name is Ben. However this is a topic which I have wanted to blog about for quite some time now.
We all have our favourite CSS galleries. Ones which always prove helpful in giving us inspiration for our own designs, or ones which we just follow to keep up with current web design trends. CSS Gallery Submission lists 288 active CSS galleries alone. The question is – do CSS galleries still work for their intended purpose?
No they don’t, and having run CSSbake for roughly 2 years now I have come to realise why this is true for most.
The web has evolved
When galleries were first being developed, the capabilities of CSS were somewhat unknown and held in high-esteem. Nowadays CSS is the norm, but a design is critiqued on the use of new methods and technologies.
Designs must now be usable and accessible to its target audience, JavaScript and Flash is used to create more playful designs and create a richer user experience. CSS is just a small piece of the larger picture. So how do we now decide what gets feature in our CSS galleries if a design is so much more than just the CSS?
Any design is featured
Time and time again I have looked through featured designs and been shocked that they have been featured at all. Designs used to be featured because they pushed the boundaries, they didn’t follow the latest trends and because they were highly visually affective. They were examples of what designers should aim to achieve – to set the standards.
This could be down to the booming popularity in galleries, meaning that rather than serving their purpose of showcasing high quality designs, getting featured is more about the hits that your site could receive.
And to me, that isn’t what its about. Yes, you should strive for your site to be featured by a gallery, but not just because you submitted it and because you want hits. You should want your design to get featured because it is seen to be high quality, setting an example to learning designers.
Online magazines round-up posts
Rather than subscribing to a CSS gallery’s RSS feed, web designers and developers are following online magazines such as Noupe or Smashing Magazine who regularly featured round ups of, what is considered, good designs.
However, this trend of round ups is slowly fading – or we can hope it is. Users who follow these websites are beginning to ask for more content rich and applicable articles and these website organisers are beginning to listen. This can, with time, see the focus moving back towards galleries.
So what can we do? Speaking to owners of CSS Galleries, I would urge them to start being a lot more selective of the designs they choose to feature. Build up a reputation of featuring higher quality designs which users will keep coming back to.
As web designers and developers I would want you to, and I would hope you would want to yourself, push your designs further and get yourself noticed for doing so. I’m sure the likes of Matthew Smith, and Elliot Jay Stocks did not get where they are now by following the trends.
Melissa
I so agree about being selective. I was just thinking that yesterday whilst looking for new submissions for CSSBake. It seems like a lot of designs that have big flashy backgrounds get into galleries but the rest of the site is crappily thrown together! Need to be more picky.
The web is in one of those transitional stages, I think… the roundups are definitely dying out like you said and it seems like everyone is waiting for the “next big thing” to happen. I wonder what it will be…
Kathleen
I’ve been following several CSS galleries the last couple of years and I agree with what you write. Things have changed a lot, not only CSS/flash/webdesign wise. These galleries pop out of the ground like mushrooms and they aren’t all that good. My favorite is bestwebgallery.com, because it’s very selective and has a wide range of styles they feature. That’s the only CSS gallery I visit.
I think for a webdesigner it’s important to get your inspiration from other sources than these galleries, otherwise you end up copying without actually realizing it (it happens unintentionally sometimes). I was watching Project Runway the last couple of days rather intensely due to sickness. I had to do something, right?
There was one designer in the show who was working with black and white almost the entire time. When I went back to work today and was asked to make a design for a cultural… thing, I ended up making a very sleek, black and white (and a tiny little bit of color) design. While designing I realized that I was inspired by this one designers point of view and I could take the inspiration and use it to make a beautiful, user friendly design.
And the round up trend, boy oh boy, I think we’ve seen enough of it now. I’d like to see some real content.
Hev
You also have those that are like me that don’t like Flash & will actually leave the site that has it. I am still on dial-up at home cause that is all I can afford. My site is still completely HTML & CSS only. I don’t use anything else for the coding. I have never needed anything else.
Lilian
Here here!
I think screen-based design is very susceptible to becoming incestuous. We see trends, we see them made glamorous by sources we trust (like those you mentioned), we then apply them to our own designs in an effort to make our work more attractive. The cycle goes round and round and round until the aesthetic is completely disconnected from all meaning and just fails to communicate.
My feeling is that the future of web inspiration galleries should not be exclusive to web. I would prefer to see a sort of mood board which showcases the very basics of design: type, line, colour, image, motion, balance. Those principles are much more basic, and much more applicable to functional design without too much of a danger of becoming a shallow trend.
That’s why I like CSS Bake. It focuses on smaller details, rather than over sensationalising the lot.