» Inspiration for flexible web design

Inspiration for flexible web design

Liquid and elastic web sites don’t have to be ugly or boring. There are plenty of beautiful examples of flexible design to inspire you.

Post Information
- Date: Wednesday, June 11, 2008 Time: 9:48 am Category: CSS, Visual Design Discussion: 5 Comments

Flexible web sites—sites that are liquid or elastic—have the unfair reputation of being ugly and plain. There are certainly lots of flexible sites that fit this stereotype, just as there are tons of ugly fixed-width sites. But flexible design doesn’t have to be unattractive. There are lots of really beautiful, graphically rich liquid and elastic web sites, which are all the more impressive to me because of the extra skill it often takes to pull off these graphic techniques in a flexible environment.

Here are some web design galleries that showcase flexible design:

No Resolution: This is an entire site devoted to showcasing liquid and elastic designs. Unfortunately, you have to register to submit entries, so things have been slow lately. Still, lots of great stuff in the archives, and new additions from time to time.
CSSGlance, liquid layout category: CSSGlance categorizes all entries as fixed-width, liquid, or elastic, which is really nice. They have a pretty good collection of liquid layouts.
CSSGlance, elastic layout category: Only a few things here, but elastic layouts are pretty rare in general, as well as hard to recognize with only a glance.
CSS Drive, liquid layout category: This category seems to have been mostly forgotten about in the past year, but it does have a good collection of liquid layouts from 2007 and earlier.
Unmatched Style, entries tagged as liquid layout: A very small collection of liquid layouts that hasn’t been updated in nearly a year, but I include it here in case this gallery ever decides to start actively tagging liquid layouts again. Let’s hope so!

I keep my own collection of designs I find attractive and inspiring in del.icio.us. I have a number of liquid layouts saved as inspiration, as well as a few inspiring elastic ones. I’ll point out a couple of my favorites:

5 Responses

You can follow the comments for this article with the RSS 2.0 feed.

Thanks for these great resources! Your awesome session today has inspired me to begin my first liquid site… I think it will be a fun challenge! Thanks!

1 Lindsey June 11, 2008 7:39 pm

I’m so glad to hear that, Lindsey! Keep me up to date on how your liquid layout comes along. And submit it to these gallery sites when you’re done.

2 Zoe Gillenwater June 12, 2008 3:51 pm

[…] MAIN PAGE: http://zomigi.com/blog/inspiration-for-flexible-web-design/ […]

3 Liquid Design « Carcak’s Weblog July 03, 2008 3:53 pm

I might add http://css.wearethebuzz.com which is currently the most frequently updated CSS gallery with a new design added every 4 hours!

4 aSKer July 25, 2008 5:48 am

aSKer, I know there are a lot more CSS galleries than the ones I listed here, but these are the only ones that specifically highlight flexible (liquid and/or elastic) web sites separately from fixed-width sites. The site you linked to doesn’t do this, so I can’t recommend it as a resource for flexible design inspiration specifically.

5 Zoe Gillenwater September 10, 2008 1:10 pm

Entries (RSS)
Comments (RSS)

18 queries.
0.174 seconds.