It’s this time of the year again – time is flying and the days are counting down to christmas and Drew McLellan is back with his advent calendar for geeks :)
→ 24ways.org

This year’s edition features a new design by Made by Elephant
and has been causing quite a debate. If you don’t know about this site yet I would encourage you to have a look and read the articles which are informative, inspiring and include various different topics and angles.

Drew received quite a bit of criticism for implementing a design which has not been finalised for all browsers and therefore shows display errors and a somewhat broken layout in older browsers and IE. I was very surprised that there was so much negative feedback and harsh words… I like the design – and love the experimental methods used to create such a user-friendly, interesting and engaging design. Being bold and strong – it delivers an engaging experience for its target group of web designers and developers.

But whether you like the design or not – the bold move with this new design should not be so harshly criticised. If you cannot take risks and push limits on a design aimed at web geeks… when can you?
I have to agree with Veerle Pieters who wrote an excellent blog post on the issue titled Do you innovate or opt for the safe route in web design?