Dolphin’s Dock

It’s been at least a couple of months since I’ve had to create anything at work containing a “button” (well I’ve had a few app interfaces to design, but nothing needing a generic web button). Today, I needed one. I went through all the motions on auto-pilot and popped out a nice little button but as I reached for “Save,” I stopped dead in my tracks. There on my screen, I noticed that, without a second thought, I had just created something that looked so incredibly old-fashioned that I couldn’t CMD+Z fast enough to get it off my screen. That’s when the sad fact hit me. The “glassy” button is dead. A moment of silence, please.

I shouldn’t have been surprised. I’d been telling my boss for a long time now that glass was going out. The trend over the last couple of years had been towards increasingly simple glass effects, and finally dropping the sharp highlight altogether for a more matte look. Still, there’s a difference between “going out” and “gone out” and it’s jarring when that which at one time reigned as the very epitome of modern “Web 2.0″ design elements finds itself in the latter categorization, and even beyond that and into the “dated” and “old-fashioned” categories.