Gradients of course have been around for a while now, but available only in WebKit browsers, using WebKit’s own, slightly more verbose syntax. I played around with radial gradients and managed to create a “bokeh” style effect with a flurry of absolutely positioned elements styled with radial gradient backgrounds. View the CSS gradient demo.

This particular page works in FF3.6 only (I was feeling lazy). It’s worth noting that instead of the reusable CSS classes used to apply the gradients, I could have stacked multiple gradients onto a single background-image declaration. Which means the same example could have been created on a single element with multiple, differently-positioned radial gradients. So obviously this is just one way of doing things – in either case you still have to juggle loads of positioning values.

A couple of gripes: firstly, because gradients are effectively a background (or border) image property, their values don’t seem to be available for DOM manipulation. Imagine the fun of being able to transition color stops! I’m sure someone more clever than me will figure out how to get at the color and color stop values and tweak them. Secondly, I imagined being able to create perfectly circular objects with gradients by creating really tight color stops. Unfortunately this seems to create rather jagged edges, at least for me.

I really think SVG, CSS gradients and rounded corners are going to change the way front-end developers designers work. We can slowly start saying goodbye to the wretched work of slicing and dicing tiny GIFs and PNGs!

The exhibition showcases his minimalist turntables, radios, alarm clocks and shelving systems in all their beauty, utility and, arguably above all, honesty. Rams and Braun took pride in products which didn’t lie to customers by pretending to be something more than the purpose they were designed for. No showy excess just to push a few more units.

Now we know who Apple rips off.

Yet the exhibition brings with it a hint of melancholy, stemming firstly from the inability to interact with objects that clearly cry out to be used. Rams-designed door handles, adhered to fake doors that lead to nowhere, next to a sign reading “DO NOT TOUCH”.

Secondly, decades of technological gallop means that these “timeless” objects are, with few exceptions, obsolete relics. They are to be looked up to and emulated but as years go by their impact will lessen simply because we won’t be able to tell what this or that button was for. Like instruments we don’t know how to play, they’ll change from intuitive to mysterious.