
3D and beveled icons can lend elegance and polish to a page design that is otherwise fairly stark. Simple icons and screenshots are the order of the day when it comes to imagery on Web 2.0 sites. You won’t find any stock photography of smiling support staff on a Web 2.0 site – that’s a tactic favored by small companies trying to mimic large corporations. If that message can appear inside of the ubiquitous ‘starburst’, all the better. Most Web 2.0 sites devote prime real estate to the message that they offer a free service. If you’ve got to convince visitors to sign up for your killer app, giving away FREE accounts surely can’t hurt. This smooth approach to type lends a modern playfulness to a company’s visual identity. In a great FontShop article analysing the logos of Web 2.0, it was clear that rounded typefaces are all the rage. The friendliness of rounded corners is in keeping with the comfortable, informal tone of many web 2.0 sites.

New CSS techniques for achieving rounded corners have helped make this style hot again. Bold primary colors suggest a playful, fun attitude and also help to draw attention to important page elements. Green is the unofficial color of web 2.0, but saturated blues, oranges and pinks are also favourites. Green is the new greyīright, cheerful colors dominate Web 2.0 sites. Most Web 2.0 sites come across as friendly, approachable and small-scale, using subtle design decisions to gain our trust. Users can generate content for a web service, promote it in a “viral” peer-to-peer fashion, and improve it’s data quality through their opinions and preferences.īut to convince a visitor to contribute their time – and data – to a web application, you need to get them to trust you first. Integral to Web 2.0 is harnessing the input of website visitors. Wikipedia’s editors may not think it’s a worthy part of the Web 2.0 discussion, but I say bring it on! Let’s take a look at the some of the communication issues facing a Web 2.0 site, and see how the “Web 2.0 look” can help to solve them. Nevertheless, it’s true that many Web 2.0 sites do share a distinctive aesthetic. The objection, I suppose, is that no set of visual criteria can accurately define something as being characteristic of Web 2.0 – if Web 2.0 can be understood as an approach to generating and distributing content, then it needn’t be tied to a particular visual style. Gradients, colorful icons, reflections, dropshadows, and large text all got a mention.Ī few days later the “visual elements” addition had been removed after a vote by wikipedians. If you didn’t blink, you may have noticed that for a few days recently Wikipedia’s entry for Web 2.0 included a subsection describing the visual elements of Web 2.0.
