Gah shiny is taking over the internet!!!!

Someone decided to put a finish on a wooden table, uploaded the picture to the internet, and now everyone is making their sites all veneered up!!! This is insanity.


In all seriousness though, you can use the pen tool to make shapes of a slightly different color for either highlights or shadows, use the shape tools, use the lasso tool and then apply a gradient to that lasso'd area, do a gradient that's either linear or radial and change the size and gradient placement... there's a million ways to make it look like a rectangle has a reflection or highlight that makes so sense in regards to everything else on a page being flat.



Looking at you, youtube.

Small children and simple-minded people are attracted to bright and shiny objects. For the rest of us, it's a matter of taste -- are garish graphics appropriate to a site? For that matter, do bright primary colors and a confused jumble of shapes go well with the subject matter? If your website is for a large, conservative, investment banking firm, you bet you won't see stuff like that. An avant-garde artistic site might well use all these tricks. Some people like lots of chrome and loud exhausts on their vehicles, to draw attention to themselves, while others want as little chrome as possible and prefer to keep a low profile, drawing little notice. It all depends on the site's subject matter, how "high energy" its presentation is desired to be, and the kind of people you want to attract. A 23 year old graphic designer fresh out of school may not have the range of experiences to make the best choice on how to present a site, and may demand that everything be garish, because that's all they know.