On Showcases/Galleries ~ Niche is nice

Posted by Andrew Faulkner on May 30th, 2007.

Andrew Faulkner is the admin at fadtastic. Andrew prides himself on standards-based, accessible web design in the city of Nottingham, UK. He believes in aesthetically pleasing accessible design and that 'standards compliant does not equal boring.'

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I’ve always been a fan of the showcases and galleries showing off talent within the web design industry. It’s inspiring to browse them daily and it’s exciting to have your work showcased within them and discussed. Some people love them, and others couldn’t care less. For those of you that adore the galleries, I have taken time out to say why niche is nice when it comes to showcases.

This post is not meant to say that the classic showcases are no good any more - that’s far from true. I’m trying to open your eyes to some of the more focused galleries. Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last 5 years, you’ll know that showcases are abundant. They’re ten-a-penny. For those rock-dwellers, here’s a fairly exhaustive list: Smashing Magazine’s compilation of galleries.

But first, the classics…

I mentioned the classic galleries and so would like to start by mentioning which galleries I most respect before focusing on the niche sites. After all, the big guns could still offer a lot of untapped power if used wisely. My top 3 (in no particular order) are:

CSS Beauty
An old faithful. I love how CSS Beauty combine standards complaint sites with beautiful graphics. Simple and effective, and boosted by an intelligent, design-savvy community.
Web Creme
Always beautiful. A graphical treat almost every day. If you dislike glossy sites, stay away though.
CSS Mania
Maybe sacrificing quality (only slightly, mind) but regularity is guaranteed.

The more popular showcases seem to be based upon either quality or quantity. Galleries with these extremes seem to have survived through the ages. Now let’s take a look at the niche gallerie, with some examples, and see what makes them tick.

Niche Galleries

OK, examples:

CSSgreen
It’s not difficult to see that the colour green has something to do with the sites on show. Let’s hope for their sake that green never goes out of fashion.
cssdesignyorkshire
Niche in a geographical sense this time.
css Zen Garden
OK, a big player in the CSS gallery world, but still niche in it’s format.

Successful Niche ~ Content & Format

It seems that after looking at the niche sites that they don’t thrive simply on quality and quantity of gallery items. There is more to it than that. More factors are involved - namely content and format. Both CSSgreen and cssdesignyorkshire both rely on niche content. Without that niche, they simply wouldn’t have got out of the starting blocks - why would you visit them when the mature galleries offer the same content? css Zen Garden is niche in a different way altogether - format. It a) doesn’t showcase actual websites and b) users create designs solely for the gallery. It’s an inspiration source for all and a CSS resource for beginners.

Thoughts

Discuss, if you will. What makes you visit particular showcases? What niches would you like to see? I’d be interested to hear your opinions on this subject.

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I don’t visit Design Showcaes/Galleries any more. The market just became way too saturated (I even ran my own gallery at one point).

Matt
May 30th, 2007
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I visit Web Creme almost daily because they seem to have the most creative sites these days, that don’t all look the same, like a lot of other gallery sites. CSS Beauty is still a good one as well. Those are about the only ones I visit frequently.

Like Matt said, the web seems to be saturated with these galleries that all link to the exact same sites, so it got boring after awhile.

Of course the Zen Garden will always be classic, but is that site even updated anymore?

J Phill
May 31st, 2007
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I think sites like CSS Green are unnecessarily specific. After all, you can sort by colour in many CSS galleries.

Jared
May 31st, 2007
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I really like Stylegala, but they’ve been better than they are now, back in the days.

Tor Løvskogen
May 31st, 2007
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Tor, I used to be a massive fan of Stylegala, but I think that the community is lacking of late.

Andrew Faulkner
May 31st, 2007
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Design Gallery’s play an important part in trend setting and the evolution of web design…

Matt Davies
May 31st, 2007
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I run CSSElite.com, and t would be interesting to know what kind of need users have for a change in the same old gallery format. I remember the days of coolhomepages.com and cwd.dk and then the influx of css galleries that one-upped those showcase sites. Running CSSElite is enjoyable, but it’s time for a new twist… maybe we’ll get something new going soon, it would be interesting to know what people are like and dislike about the inspiration process when using CSS galleries…

css gallery
May 31st, 2007
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As for CSS Elite, as it’s not niche I’d suggest focusing on either quality submissions (the word CSS in the title makes me expect beautiful CSS sites) or quantity. As well as doing this, I’d suggest building more of a community focus - the asides (Dev Resources) you have should be used more and maybe try to generate discussion around these. If you go down the quality route (and I’d recommend this), then maybe provide a brief review of each site in the gallery and get people to really join in saying why they like/dislike the site in question. I think CSS Beauty is the best at this format.

To really be innovative, why not take Jon Snook’s advice (linked from the article) and give different data to the user? Nearly all galleries give the same information and it would be refreshing to see something different. A new approach.

Feel free to fire me an email at contact(at)fadtastic(dot)net if you want to discuss any ideas in more detail.

J Phil, Re: CSS Zen Garden. I didn’t hear anything different, but maybe you’re right. It’d be a shame as creating sample CSS Zen garden submissions really helped me grasped the basics when CSS was new to me.

Andrew Faulkner
May 31st, 2007
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Anyone find or know of a good Print/brochure Gallery?

Chris
June 1st, 2007
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I prefer Galleries that are not as strict in displaying only CSS though. screenfluent.com ist my favourite.
It’s more about “Web 2.0 webdesign” that a particular dogma.

Tadeusz Szewczyk
June 1st, 2007
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Chris, I don’t know of any but would love to find one or two myself. Any help, readers?

Andrew Faulkner
June 1st, 2007
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Light on Dark is a niche gallery featuring only dark-hued sites with light text, and W3Csites focuses specifically on standards-compliancy.

I’d like to see more galleries like CSS Drive which feature specific categorization: “Two Columns”, “Clean”, “Liquid Layout”, and so on.

Agreed that the market is saturated; it’s becoming more about volume than quality.

Darren Hoyt
June 2nd, 2007
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I have to agree with what a lot of these comments above say. Most of the gallery sites show off sites that yes maybe CSS based but lack design. Isnt a gallery not only supposed to show good code but good design as well. I mean if you go to a site that is a hair to the left of a stock wordpress theme would you want to look at the code. Whats to really learn or admire? Granted there are some great sites out there but it seems the majority of any galleries content is sub-par saturating the web with these vanilla sites. But yes I too am guilty of looking at these galleries, and to be honest the majority of the time I see what not to do, and where not to go with designs to stand out. My vote for galery site is Design Meltdown http://www.designmeltdown.com. Not a gallery site per say but an incredible resource.

Jeff
June 4th, 2007
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Darren, thanks for the suggestion. Light on dark looks pretty cool and very niche.

Jeff, I totally agree. I like to see beauty and good code combined. That’s why Web Creme is one of my personal favourites - beautiful sites that are often well coded. I think having a niche also helps to keep out all of the (bad) Wordpress templates etc and lets the gallery focus on what it wants.

Andrew Faulkner
June 4th, 2007
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I started a gallery of design elements because I felt that this was a niche that hadn’t really been addressed.If you want to design a headline or a comment form, wouldn’t it be nice if you could go to a place where a lot of good examples were gathered together? That’s what I’ve tried to achieve.

Any chance of a comment preview?

Christian Watson
June 7th, 2007
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Christian, good example. I see what you’re trying to achieve there.

As for the comment issues - it’s on the to-do list. Thanks for the feedback.

Update: Links are now available on the comment WYSIWYG.

Andrew Faulkner
June 7th, 2007
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Hello, we run http://www.cssartillery.com We got around 50+ submissions every day. But we try to keep the quality high. And still update around 20 submissions/day.

CSSArtillery.com
January 10th, 2008
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I would love to have CSS Loaf added to the list. CSSloaf brings together designs from 35 other showcases so that you don’t have to go all over the place to see the latest designs. We feature large screenshots so that each design is visible; no need to strain your eyes on tiny thumbnails.

CSS Loaf | Daily Slice of Design
June 10th, 2008
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