thats so funny!
my opinion: drop shadows are great in moderation… im not sure if i can drop a link here without getting in trouble i just made an offer for our network that looks pretty bomb using just a hair of them and thats the way i like it… nice and tasteful.
That’s true of most all of this stuff; the problem is so many people go “that’s neat” and then slap it on EVERYTHING.
I’m a firm believer in moderation… when taken in moderation.
Actually I can’t say, Its upto user choice, If they like it, Then I will design it for them, Its completely on what type of feedback I get from people
Without knowing anything more about the situation except what I’ve read here, I would suspect that the designer might now be very experienced. I’ve been lucky to work with some pretty great designers and the last thing they want to do is clutter up a good layout with gimmicks.
Real designers use corporate colours and established imagery to create a consistent web experience with the emphasis on legibility. If there’s a drop shadow in the brochure, there’s probably a drop shadow on the website. …Or as mentioned earlier by someone else in the thread, a drop shadow to provide some depth and separation between elements.
This is one of my favorite articles on web design from a list apart.
Drop shadows will almost always be used somewhere in a design. As others have stated they should be subtle. I started out as a print designer and then learned about web design and coding. When you see the problems you run into with drop shadows and also excessive gradients, you learn to tone them down.
If you use the same designers, it would be good to enlighten them on the evils of abusing drop shadows. It may take a little time, but it will be worth it in the long run.
I don’t really feel that drop shadows are bad.
I have designed websites in the past with drop shadows, and depending on how you make them appear, will depend on if they are obvious or not. I always stay clear from obvious drop shadows, but subtle is what’s really impressive. Subtle can either be achieved by a small distance, or a none-obvious coloured drop shadow.
Apple have much to do with today’s design, and web design techniques. They seem to have created mini-crazes in many areas.
I end up having to export them as 32bit PNG’s, which end up taking about 4 days to download.
Can’t really say I have had the same problem. I tend to just use a 1px width and their respected height, then repeat it so it saves space. The more passionate a design is, the harder it is to code, and at times the easier it is to butcher the design in order to accommodate easier coding practices.
I too use drop shadows, but 90% of the time those affects are placed on a repeated background.
Then they have the cheek to complain that it takes a while to load.
I think it would be good if you posted something here, like a design sample of something, so we can see if there are alternative ways to code your design. It’s very difficult to judge something on just what’s said.
Heavy offset drop shadows are a signature calling card for novice designers. We call those who rely heavily on (poorly used) layer styles “FX monkies”.
Drop shadows are powerful when used properly. Expecting someone without any formal training in graphic design to comprehend the concept is sometimes asking too much.
If the designer is one of the few who understands the limitations and opportunities of the online medium as different from print, and if the designer understands and can describe the organisation, structure and hierarchy of content then yes, it’s probably good to get them on board early on. Unfortunately, far too many “designers” are no more than graphic artists, who sketch out a flat visual mockup in Photoshop and consider that to be their work done, and all this will do is set unrealistic expectations and impractical, incomplete or conflicting design goals.
Although CSS Zen Garden is a bit old hat these days, it shows remarkably clearly how little input you need from graphic artists in the site construction. The content and structure is what is really important, and the visuals can much more easily be slapped on top of a well-structured page than content can be slotted into a visual layout.
VERY well worded explanation of what I’ve meant.
word i totally agree with deathshadow60 and Stevie D!
Drop Shadows is not stupidly.
It’s same your body shadows , if you see your body nice - it’s nice .
A simple way of drawing a drop shadow of a rectangular object is to draw a gray or black area underneath and offset from the object. In general, a drop shadow is a copy in black or gray of the object, drawn in a slightly different position.
thats so funny!
Probably a healthy contributor to why on that TML communications site the “accessibility” page is still under contstruction
I personally dont think you should overdoo it with the drop shadow but it does depend on the site and what else you have on it, like pictures and other media 
Rich <snip>
1] it’s not the designers, it’s a the customer. To design means to plan. A good designer graphic or otherwise takes the media he’s design for into consideration and more. Also a good design should begin and end cleanly. Digressing a bit from the web-based theme here, if the effects used supersedes the message of the piece the design is actually a convoluted failure as far as any GD college professor will tell you. knowing how to apply PS filters does NOT make a persona designer for print, web or other wise.
The standard percent of BAD designers out there aside, most request for superfluous gimmicks in design come from clients. ( remember a client wanting:“a two color job, you know to save money cause I heard they cost less, but with full color cause I know two color is boring”) That statement is wrong in so many levels but that the paying clientele that’s out there…
2] I have a friend from art school who now working as the Web Designer /Art Director for an big agency in DC. He BOASTED to me once that he doesn’t know any CSS, Javascript, Actionscript or PHP, and that he bare grasps HTML ( which I assume he meant that he assumes mark up for lay out when he has to do lay out and still struggles at that)… but he can manipulate images like no other and that’s why he has risen in the ranks and that “coding the site and making it work is NOT what he does, or what the client pays him for” While I disagree with his position, I cannot blame him for having a sense of delegational capitalism.
I am a print designer mutating into a web designer , but I couldn’t agree with Stevie more! But that statement also means that any design can be tacked on to any code as long as the structure has been coded FIRST. Following what I have been saying, clients come to me for a PSD of a website sometimes even before they know what the website is going to be about… ( let alone content and structure, or a site map… etc) They want something that “looks like the website of a …” or looks like their competitors site. The coding of the site follows from that template. Again I disagree with this method , but you cant blame the GD for doing GD ON REQUEST.
AS an aside, and probably being redundant , GD is NOT merely applying fliters and mixing fonts. Whether is easy to code or not, many web designs are eyesores or visual mazes that confuse the eye rather than guide it … (THE AVOIDANCE OF THIS IS THE MARK OF GOOD GD). Which also makes me fear for the web once CSS3 takes hold and we have BOTH coders and designers tying to impress clients with flaming , all text, custom font,spinning css logos which every one will “think ok to use” because they now can be done w/o any graphics and with only <div class=“uglylogo”>Logo</div> as the mark up.
as the Ancient Greeks said… ‘everythig in moderation’ Drop shadows are fine when used sparsely but when used appropriately they’re fine. I think people sometimes just stick a drop shadow on everything by default and it makes things look amateurish . . .
i don’t like drop shadows too much either. they can be used but only where necessary and limited. Even though the designer might think the design is great, it would only help if people actually comment on it before it goes into development. that way other ideas are heard and the designer might move away from the shadows. as mentioned above about the rounded corners… it was overdone and now people actually hate it. same will happen with drop shadows if ‘designers’ don’t limit themselves… which each designer should actually know.
that is also one thing i have against ‘web designers’ who call themselves web designers but they only do a psd layout and not the css and html implementation. they don’t fully understand the restrictions there are, cross browser functionality and also… what i find with my own designs is that it changes a lot from concept to implementation. i find things that work better when implementing it for html and so the site grows into something more.
the bad thing about drop shadows as well is that if it is in print its less work for the web designer and less for the website to render and if it is outdated you can just print another, whereas a website will take more work to redo if you only design for what’s hot right now and not something ‘classic’…
just my opinion…
You dont need to slice the drop shadows in PNG format all the times, if the background is of a single color or a pattern of similar colors you may use GIF to optimize the loading speed. while exporting the gif set the Matt value to the same as the background color. its a little tricky but sometimes really works. I ask my markup developers to first try with gif if it looks ugly only then go for png. alternatively use CSS3 for drop shadows but dont limit your designers
Communicating with the designer your working with can really help. In addition to preventing layouts that are a pain to build out and don’t really work right, you can also give them some more creative options. You can show them some stuff they hadn’t thought were possible like fluid width and menu techniques. You can show them the cool stuff you’ve wanted to build.
It surprises me that through out this discussion such hatred of the drop shadow emerges and how the resulting code has to accommodate the design. Of course some designers abuse a particular look or feature, but why do we use drop shadows? Along with other effects it is a way to visually emphasis a particular part of the design. If everything has a drop shadow then the effect is lost.
I’m also not convinced by the mentality that seems to place great coding over the visuals of a website purely because it either makes life tricky for the coders or the load times will be slightly longer (assuming optimised images here). Websites are a joint effort on the most part trying to strike the balance between what the client wants (paying the bills), what the designer can do, and what the coder can do. If everyone is doing their jobs properly then there’s no reason why a designer won’t make concessions on their design or help the client to understand some of the limitations of the medium. Likewise the coder should be able to express themselves to the designer making them aware of the consequences of some of their design choices.
Design always has restrictions imposed on it. Price, medium, client expectations, press, time, construction, there’s simply no reason why coders can’t impose restrictions. How those are communicated though is usually down to who has the biggest hissy fit, ego, temper, or is paying the bill.