Is it me or do a lot of websites these day bear a great resemblence to Mac OSX? Application boxes with beveled edges, lots of light shading, aqua style buttons and crystal effects on almost everything.
In today’s line up I give you the new Yahoo!, ZapZap, the pinstripe PageFlakes.
As the desktop and web continue to blur into each other [the Office 2007 website looks remarkably similar to the application itself - ribbons included] it seems that looking gorgeous is ever more important. However, the least gorgeous site on the Web currently, MySpace, continues to astound with it’s popularity. So form does not always win over function, and cool is not always defined by looking great. There’s hope for us geeks yet.
Rounded corners are rife (something that I used to be beaten up about a lot in my working life once upon a time). Web design from scratch has some nice observations about the current trends in web page and application design.
If the web does turn into a Mac then can this be a bad thing. Afterall applications should be aesthetically pleasing as well as funtional. I’m sure Jacon Nielsen would disagree. And indeed the mighty Google themselves tend to go for beauty in simplicity.