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Retro Trends Among Modern Web Designers |
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Now that the world has moved on past the first decade of the 21st century, the Internet is changing rapidly to keep up with new technology. As web designers meet the demands of a new generation of Internet users and Net-ready devices, website designs change actively to allow for a plethora of new features. HTML5, CSS3, and updated versions of Firefox, Internet Explorer and Google Chrome allow websites to take their design to the next level and impact users by delivering a truly visually-stunning experience. Hardware acceleration enables websites with high-definition motion graphics to operate at top speeds, moving on from the problems of primitive versions of Flash and from the limitations of outdated coding languages. The mechanics behind these sites isn’t the only thing that is changing, however. Retro and vintage design trends are taking hold of websites that jumped on the CSS3 bandwagon early. Perhaps the first well-known example of the CSS3 community’s retro design scheme was when Google changed their search logo to celebrate Jules Verne’s 183rd birthday. The regular Google logo was transformed into a retro-era futuristic submarine. The design of the logo was inspired by Jule Verne’s "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea", and the submarine featured in the book, the Nautilus. Google utilized new design capabilities to turn their website into an antique-themed interface with brass submarine portholes and other technology from the period. Google had gone retro before with its May 2010 logo, dedicated to the popular video game Pac-Man. Joining in with Google, the British ice cream company Taywell customized their interface with stylish vintage features. While the elements in this design are more subtle than Google’s, they enhance the website greatly. Taywell’s design featured an old-fashioned typograph in their logo, a color scheme composed of light pastels, and pictures of delicious ice cream desserts on traditional plates surrounded by retro-styled frames. Some retro elements that typify the vintage design scheme are logos with rounded edges and sleek cursive fonts. French Touch’s official web design site uses CSS3 and Wordpress, a popular blog CMS, to frame their content with elegant, minimalist vintage design. Capturing the style, French Touch uses subtly-shaded, stretched out font with a geometrical, light-colored pattern to supplement their eye-catching, circular website logo. Webmasters who want to take advantage of an easily-managed CMS with stunning visuals should seek out a good wordpress web hosting review to find the best place to host their blog or design portfolio. All sorts of images from the past act as sources of inspiration for the present vintage design trends. For example, CSS Tinderbox integrated aged newspapers with bolded, eye-catching headlines in their site showing off cascading style sheets. The font on the site borrows from the Cyrillic alphabet, used in Russian and a number of other Eurasian languages, and this gives the site a retro, Soviet-era feel. The text on the site is prearranged with newspaper columns with the tasteful addition of a newspaper vending machine that matches the site’s design theme. What era of retro design do web designers prefer to use in their websites? The most popular revival periods range between right before World War II all the way up to the 1960s, but many designers embrace other time periods for inspiration as well. Art Deco, Americana, Pop art, and Bauhaus School of Design are recurrently popular sources of inspiration for website aesthetics, but other ideas have popped up in recent years, such as emulating the interface of a the early Macintosh Operating System, which is used as a Blogger template. Experienced designers can freely blend vintage illustrations, fonts, and other implements with contemporary design to create striking visuals, such as in the case of They Make Apps. In addition to the popular Wordpress CMS, Joomla is an open-source platform that supports some of the most stunning retro design templates to date. Joomla web hosting reviews give webmasters a better idea of which hosting services are perfect for their business, blog, or portfolio site. Website styles don’t always have to incorporate vintage design standards to be called retro-inspiring. Fundamental elements like pleasing color matching, minimalistic design, aesthetics, and elegance are more important than ever for the web designer. The point of using vintage design styles with a website is to invoke archetypical symbols of a past era to create visually appealing and eye-catching graphics. Blending innovative technology with vintage design sensibility engages users and captures their attention. Go back to Programming and Web Development Articles home page
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