Designing Web 2.0 Style

"Remember the 2advanced culture and the hype that surrounded it? Flash-based wizardry was all the rage. And now? We've grown up. We've moved on. I see the same bell curve in the standards movement as of late. We've peaked, and although we'll see the greater design community continue to adopt, I suspect we'll see the thought leaders shift to speaking about more than just divs and selectors and the W3C validator. That's something many of us have been saying for months now." - Cameron Moll, istockphoto interview

This is just a bunch of notes and unfinished ideas...

Are You an Indifferent Designer?
What design cliches could be used to indicate
Is It Real Design If You Start With a Template?

Why I like designing for clients:
I like making people happy. I like enabling their ideas to appear exactly how they envisioned it. I like it when they say that they tried to have 7 other people do the same logo and I am the only one that knew what they meant.
It's a great skill to be able to interpret what a client wants, understand them, help them, guide them, listen to them, and put your personal taste aside.
Developing your disdain for popular culture will.... leave you behind.

artist struggle to create something that at most will be an original combination of already existing artistic expressions.

You have to be able to be a consumer of popular design style, a trend watcher

Most clients want you to design in a style that is current. You have to know what is current, how to create it, and not hate life because you have to design in a style that you didn't invent. Appreciate it. It's not gonna be here forever. If you stay on top of what new design styles major companies are using then you shouldn't have to reuse the same basic elements and bore yourself. You can sell someone a new style if a bigger company is using it but it's much harder to sell someone you've created to be in polar opposition to popular design.
If you can't embrace popular design in any context and make it your own, you'll struggle building a fan base but it grow with exposure. There's no reason to hate people that are open minded about what they do.


A Design Firm that uses the Web 2.0 style
Popular Graphic Design Tips
Glossy Web 2.0 Logo Photoshop Tutorial
Pixel to Life Tutorials
Creating a web 2.0 blog


The Web 1.0 Example:

Written in 2001, Web's Most Overused Graphics Techniques Revealed may seem like an outdated post with no relevance to you but it's history. A document to that reflects that that there will always exist design that people will feel is "overused" but these examples are all things that are still being used. Just in a different way.

Web 2.0 Work Group