Vintage 2.0 - Glossy Retro Takes Over Web Design
inspiredm.com
inspiredm.com
I really buy into the whole design-for-your-product idea. I also really appreciate clean lines and a lot of whitespace. Good contrast, like tasteful transparency, can do a lot to make your site look professional as well. Most importantly, though, your site has to be useable. If you have a 4 MB background image and use MySQL with all the defaults, I don't care what your site looks like, its gonna be too slow for me to use.
Its a cool style that might work in some cases, but I don't see it becoming mainstream.
Of course, I didn't quite see it that way as the time; I was thrilled to use the single-pixel hack and get my table spacing Just Right for the sliced and diced images.
Looking at these new site, I feel as if the designers have been given a copy of that book and fallen in love.