Should CSS be Trendy?

Anyone who keeps up with the development of CSS3 knows that CSS3 can do some cool things.

Super Cool Web Design Things

Cool things have been around in web design ever since someone got the stupid brilliant idea of using spacer.gifs. Among the cool things that have plagued graced the internet over its lifetime are:

• Guestbooks
• Blinking Text
• Marquee Text
• Background MIDI
• Clipart
• Cute animated GIFs
• Custom mouse cursors

And many, many more things that have absolutely no place on the internet today. I read an article from my friend Jeremy at JC Designs, and he was really excited that CSS3 now supports image reflections. Here are some examples of image reflections in case you aren't familiar with the term. It's a big hit these days, similar to how splash screens and flash intros were a big hit years ago. Point being? It's going to get old.

The Question at Hand

Should a standards based language that takes years to draft, years to test, and years to implement into web design browsers be trendy?

Today's Trends are Tomorrow's Embarrassments

What really caught my eye when reading the demo of the CSS image reflection was a comment from someone named Michael (who I wish had listed a blog to link to).

Very cool, but my thought/question is this: When CSS3 is finally fully supported, wont many of these cool features–which are all mostly inspired by Web UI design trends that are already many years old–be outdated? I think its ideal to be able to do all these wonderful things with CSS rather than with graphical images, but many of the CSS3 eye candy capabilities arent exactly cutting-edge anymore. By the time ALL the browser support them, well have moved on to other things (I assume).

The "CSS3 eye candy" includes gradients, rounded rectangles, and many other cliche web design trends. Trends by definition come and go. So here we are in 2010, and yet the web still does not fully support 1997 and 2000 CSS specifications. What makes us think that CSS3 will be adopted in time for these super cool trends to still be useful? There are two consequences in place here: A) The CSS3 dev's efforts will be wasted since the trends they are coding will be outdated Or, and by far the worst consequence...

CSS3 Design Dictation

If I am wrong and the current trends are still in style by the time CSS3 officially roles out, we are going to see an overall drop in creativity in the entry-level web design world. The web will become cluttered with these trends (even more so than now), because of the ease of implementing them into a design. Simply put, you use the tools you have, and if CSS3 gives you rounded rectangles, you might just use them because you can, it's easy, and it "looks cool". You simply should not design in code. It stifles the creative process like no other. Design in a sketchbook, design in photoshop, whatever you do, don't design in Dreamweaver.

In conclusion...

Implementing today's "hot trends" into CSS3 will either prove to be a waste of man hours, or worse, a devolution of the creativity that the web world is already lacking. What's your opinion on implementing design trends into CSS3? June 16, 2010