After going through many CSS galleries, I observed a common feature - clouds and the beautiful sky. It simply adds gradients and informal, illustrative and vast look to the headers. Some of the designs even went into details like mountains and flock of sheep in it.

But sometimes, the same objects; Sky and clouds have been used in a subtle way. See those effects inHopking Designs and Land Experts. Enough talk; See them.

#11) You Rant

#10) Hopking Design

#9) Land Experts

#8) El Pescadito

#7) Welika Villege

#6) Bin Slash Bash

#5) Global Zoo

#4) Joshua Brayant

#3) WiredTree Hosting

#2) Arty Papers

#1) UX Magazine

Last week, just before coming to the fabulous city of mumbai, I tried to make a (digital) Rails poster - my 2 cents. Here is the outcome. Image from Lionking.org and hosted by Flickr. (Guess inspired from whom)

Gayathri, a friend and collegue of mine had done a nice ROR poster last week. The best part is two ‘enlighted’ programmers smiling at each other. It was good to see ‘enterprise’ level guys blnking at it in surprise. It was an effective internal promotion.

digg.com is down. Their maintenance page looks simple and cool. Click on the photo to see larger version.

Yes. Animated favicons are on the rise. From Niall Kennedy to the latest Wikio, many use animated gifs as favicons instead of treditional .ico bitmaps. Since IE will never display favicons (even .ico files) anymore, why dont we exploit the new Firefox support for animated gifs as favicons?

<link rel="shortcut icon" href="/favicon.ico" type="image/x-icon" />
<link rel="icon" href="/animated_favicon.gif" type="image/x-icon" />


In FF, this gives more attention to the particular site tab, addressbar and in bookmarks. Suddenly you are more visible to the world

Update: Use FavIcon Generator from HTML-KIt to generate favicons from your own images. Yes. even scrolling text icons
There is a nice video tutorialon how to create your favicons and then upload to blogger

BBC’s complaints about websites forced me to check webforth for markup errors. I fixed a couple of things. I explored more and checked some cool websites (Including BBC.co.uk) for markup as well as css validation. Read the results below to see whats going on.

It was interesting to see that webstandards.org fails in CSS validation and Microsoft.com has amazingly perfect HTML homepage. Cool!

It appears that it is extremely difficult to keep both markup and css valid. The sites with user generated content (Del.icio.us for example) and sites showing external markup (Like the ads in techcrunch.com) are more vulnerable to this.

W3c is yelling for standards and nobody seems to listen. Yes. This experiment will not be good for me in the long run. But they are just observations. Take that eye from me.

Two happenings in mobile industry: Hutch went Pink and Spice decorated itself with multicolors.

Hutch’s old orange theme had a mild soothing effect. Their branding was excellent. Anyway the change to fast colors is expected - it looks great. I know all are saying Hutch went nuts. But if you observe closer you will see that the pink they are using is not that much girly. Its darker and warmer (I love that color) .

Spice always tried to attach itself with young people. The trasition of their color schemes and the ever famous polka dots is, unfortunately, horrible.