I love their guestbook, and I’m inspired even more to experiment with skeuomorphism once I start focusing on CSS!
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Yes! I love this. in the mid 2010s, you would see bunches of sites that had texture like this. people would scan their stationery or create templates offline, scan it, and then code it into their layouts. I did it once or twice with some drawings but I don’t have the skill that some of these other creators have, mine never quite lined up correctly.
on the flip side, it’s a ton of effort for something you hope will work out, but I think it’s worth the creative energy to try anyway! I know it can be daunting to do something like this.
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Oh this is super inspiring, i might try something similar…
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i-land (whose creator i interviewed a little bit ago) is a tour-de-force example of this! i hope it becomes more popular as a style, as i think it’s far more accessible for people with traditional / physical art backgrounds to get into web design.
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Great idea! And design trends tend to go in twenty year cycles, don’t they? So I think skeuomorphism is due a comeback pretty soon. Perhaps these are the first waves!
I know I’ll welcome a swing back to more texture in design.
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Heck yeah! There’s so much you can do with skeuomorphism. I haven’t published it yet but my site tries to take this concept as far as I could, with an art gallery modelled after a portfolio folder, a homepage modelled after a notice board with letters(articles) pinned to it, and a welcome page with an animated letter coming out of an envelope addressed to the reader (& a custom postage stamp obviously). I even managed to get the fonts to look really close to hand-written, by applying a grainy css mask-image to the text, giving a scratchy imperfect pen look, I’m still way too stoked about that:
I need to see if I can claw out some time and motivation to work on this again soon, and get to actually posting.
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That sounds really fun, I look forward to seeing it when it’s published!
Yeah, I think the most daunting part for me is trying to make designs responsive. Back when things were static sizes, I imagine it was easier to make something like a desk or a page in a journal be the same sorts of proportions as in real life. But nowawadys it can be hard to make something that works on a phone or zoomed in without being too small or weird proportions… I like how the example guestbook in the post gets around this by having discrete notes that can wrap/move as needed.
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