Eek. I think, and I stress that this is wrought of my own unprofessional feelings, but I think that in the early days of rich consumer UI (pre-2004 lets say), that rounded corners, gradients and shadows did some great things to design, because they created affordances so that people knew, for instance, that a button was a button. It stood out against the other website clutter and cruft. But we've sort of moved on. I'…
I appreciate the minimalism of flat UI, but I do feel the pendulum has swung too far in the opposite direction. Microsoft is the worst culprit here - presenting a text block containing some hyperlinks, but the text is all styled identically so you have to hover the mouse over a word to notice the link. WTF? Sure, let's keep things clean and minimal, but there needs to be some kind of basic visual language that indica…
Affordance of hyperlinks is key to the Web.
I apply the following CSS to most/many sites to identify links:
a {
color: #427fed;
text-decoration: none;
};
a:active {
background-color: #427fed;
color: #fffff6;
};
a:hover {
text-decoration: underline;
}