When Simon Collison wrote the end of CSS showcases my initial thoughts were that they really ended a long time ago when everyone decided they would start their own showcase. It got to the point where every new site was being showcased at the same time so there was nothing really unique between the sites. Stylegala did the smart thing and decided to build a community around the site and to my knowledge it is the most popular of these CSS galleries today. However, I think the idea of a CSS gallery is dead and should remain so.
I’m not one to say whether we have won the fight for Web Standards or not, but I do know there is enough awareness about it within our community (the people who actually visit these galleries) that we can focus on design overall now, whether the site is tables, Flash, or CSS. Where’s the gallery that takes in all of these sites and focuses on quality design and not quality code? Yes code is important, but above the hood matters more to the end user than under the hood.
Where is the design gallery that focuses on not only the whole site, but just the logos and icons as well? If you are going to make a design showcase, why not make a comprehensive one? To me that’s the next evolution of design showcases. Let them die and resurrect like the Phoenix.
Originally posted on May 31, 2006 @ 1:50 pm