My favorite CSS Reboots

Now that CSS Reboot has been up for more than a day, I couldn’t wait to share my favorites. Besides, now that we know the voting is cracked, the only way to get honest opinions is to blog about them. So tell me your favorites too. For now, here are mine.

the most attractive

These websites, by being original, well balanced, and pleasing to see, are my top favorites.

Matt Brett gets first place. Mainly because his site is what I would have liked my website to look like. The colors, the emphasis on content, the beefy footer… it’s all done right.

Paul Armstrong Designs comes in second. It’s a great example of clean design, with the right colors and nice icons. Each section is well designed to fit the purpose, and the comments section is just awesome.

AETHELYON is third. It’s not just clean and attractive, but it has a certain attitude as well. The header graphic, combined with the colors, typography, and borders, make the website look very intelligent.

Two sites that didn’t change so much visually, but definitely made huge leaps in functionality, are Avalonstar and Fadtastic. It wasn’t until I actually commented on both that I realized how much they have improved functionally since their last designs. 9rules was another good functional redesign. It’s a lot easier to find content that interests you, and you can even select favorites… very cool.

Of course, there are other great designs. I’ll stop ranking, and give you the whole list.

• dazb
• ribic
• giftedniche
• dotone
• jasongraphix
• ac-creations
• astarwithin
• shexy
• thaisvilanova
• khmerang
• kide
• kylecato
• kyyhkynen
• mtcodex
• mixtaping
• ridaalbarazi
• lucidcrew
• antonpeck
• sumeetjain
• beevzor
• watchmakerproject

Come to think of it, that list is probably too long… and that’s considering that I definitely missed a few.

Is that all?

No! There’s definitely some clear mistakes made with many of these and other reboots. One problem is text size. Honestly, any website with text smaller than this website is too small. What’s the obsession with fitting text into small spaces? I’d rather scroll than lose my vision. Besides, it’s been 2 years since I last wore glasses and I don’t feel like going back, so please, learn to size text reasonably.

Another problem is contrast. Using less contrast to de-emphasize text is not cool… because when you have text on a page, no matter how hard-to-read you make it, your viewers are forced to read it. It’s a natural brain reaction; you see text, you automatically decipher it, even if it’s a mess, or very hard to read. So understand that if you are going to put text on your page, it’s going to be read… if you don’t want it read, don’t show it. And if your content doesn’t have enough contrast to make it readable, I’m leaving for sure. There’s no “increase contrast” button in Firefox, so I’m not willing to forgive it.

There’s a few lesser problems, such as horizontal bars on liquid layouts, lousy colors chosen, etc. They key thing to remember is that CSS is not meant to make your website less accessible! If your website is harder to read or use than it would be without styling, you’ve made a mistake.

And with that, I’m off to do homework.