2 July, 2010

"Is CSS the new Photoshop"

Via John Nack (Photoshop's Senior Product Manager): two examples of complex web graphics generated by CSS alone: no separately-prepared .jpgs, .gifs, etc., merely code alone.

Partly because the designers have optimised for webkit-based browsers, the images don't appear perfectly in Firefox (and who cares whether they work in IE?), but there are pre-rendered images for the rest of us.

An image of an iPhone.
Eleven iOS icons.

Impractical? Maybe, but still a fascinating proof of concept.

I really don't want to be overly picky, but the adoption of the Mac aesthetic possibly diminishes the achievement for me. That slightly-cartoony visual style, making extensive use of drop-shadows and smooth gradients, inherently favours the CSS approach.