Re: New CSS Web Gallery :-)

[Chris Coyier]

I absolutely love it Soh. I think it has a ton of personality and is really fun to just browse around an experience. I think you’ve implemented all of the features beautifully. I’m starting to have some opinions on web design galleries, so I figure I’ll just spit them out here.

– Lose the star ratings — design galleries are for 5-out-of-five star designs only, the curator should make the call.

– Lose the comments — this is debatable… but galleries seem to be zero-comment wastelands, even on the super popular ones. I’m usually always in favor of fostering discussion and debate, but simplification in this case may win out.

– Make it as searchable and browseable as absolutely possible. Tag and categorize the crap out of them (maybe make users able to tag as well).

– Combine quality crops/thumbnails AND full-size views. Difficult to do, but I think bestwebgallery.com does a good job. They can fit a lot of thumbs on one page, and you get a wider view on rollover, very smart.

– Have something to say. I like how unmatchedstyle.com has been doing this lately. Each new post has some commentary on why they think it is nice. They even do a podcast now which is cool. [ I think designbombs has the perfect design for this already, the crazy mad scientist dude could do the commentary ]