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I've also found great success tending towards minimalist. The advantage is that you're mistakes will be of the variety "this could have been a little more impac

I've also found great success tending towards minimalist. The advantage is that you're mistakes will be of the variety "this could have been a little more impactful" and not "Dear God why would anyone do a 3d rainbow extrude with 17 different grunge fonts on a space background???". In short, you embarass yourself less. You already know how to make a 'good enough' simple design. You might prefer to make a glorious, exciting complex one, but odds are you don't know how. Which makes sense, because this is hard to pull off. If you stay simple, you get 'good enough'. Try to get complex and fail, you get visual torture. If you'd like to make more interesting designs, learn the techniques little by little, but make your finished products no more complex than you can be confident in. Regarding gradients: when you do use them, be subtle. A gentle shift from one color of red to a slightly deeper one can be nice and help draw attention. A shift from red to a green will make babies cry. As a general rule of thumb, colors should only gradient towards different shades of themselves or towards black or white. Seems obvious, I know, but...

ErrantX 16y ago
You make a good point r.e. gradients. Honestly, though, even the most subtle gradients can go very wrong - I'm usually referring to background or header gradients where it justs wrecks the emphasis of the page or clouds text etc. Speaking for myself I prefer highlighting as a more unobtrusive way to add the "extra touch" Also I think it is about personal taste; my designs tend towards the same minimalist, centered, coloured menu bar, links in a certain way etc. design because I vastly prefer sites like that :) (also the beauty of minimalism is that you can "impact" buttons and so forth really easily if you have a good colour scheme - Startup Wiki is an example of where I got this pretty wrong...... :))
alanh 16y ago
> A shift from red to a green will make babies cry. Yes. I want to share a design an unqualified team member once seriously proposed: http://img.skitch.com/20100630-m473a35wsrcwsis547mmxjetcq.png http://img.skitch.com/20100630-m473a35wsrcwsis547mmxjetcq.pn...

ErrantX 16y ago

You make a good point r.e. gradients. Honestly, though, even the most subtle gradients can go very wrong - I'm usually referring to background or header gradients where it justs wrecks the emphasis of the page or clouds text etc. Speaking for myself I prefer highlighting as a more unobtrusive way to add the "extra touch" Also I think it is about personal taste; my designs tend towards the same minimalist, centered, coloured menu bar, links in a certain way etc. design because I vastly prefer sites like that :) (also the beauty of minimalism is that you can "impact" buttons and so forth really easily if you have a good colour scheme - Startup Wiki is an example of where I got this pretty wrong...... :))

alanh 16y ago

> A shift from red to a green will make babies cry. Yes. I want to share a design an unqualified team member once seriously proposed: http://img.skitch.com/20100630-m473a35wsrcwsis547mmxjetcq.png http://img.skitch.com/20100630-m473a35wsrcwsis547mmxjetcq.pn...