Thanks to The Brads, I ran across Dribbble the other day, and it's the new coolest thing ever. The two main things that struck me were "man, modern web designs use a LOT of soft gradients" and "hmm, I really want to make some more web sites now." The latter is pretty much the point.

I've never been a web designer. With enough effort, I can sort of emulate one, but the results are expectedly mediocre. That's mainly because that's a natural extension of being a web developer - the stuff I program has to look like something, and CSS is essentially a programmer's design tool anyway. However, visual design isn't my gig, so I don't feel the least bit squeamish about cobbling together something reasonably clean and aesthetically pleasing from various sources of "inspiration" and calling it a day.

Fortunately, looking at nice, clean designs (like this WordPress admin site, actually, which I kind of like) is good inspiration nonetheless, since it makes me want to write something cool enough to rise to the occasion. A minimalist design with exaggerated tabs, labels, and such implies that the stuff you're looking at is organized logically enough to match, and that's the kind of thing I can do.

Now that GCD is a reasonable 1.0, Dribbble has me itching to move on to what's next. Far and away the best candidates for fancy new UIs are my various projects for work, but that's only ever so exciting. Maybe I'll take another pass at my Minecraft server to see if I can take advantage of its database-attached-ness. Probably better would be really diving into Cocoa programming - that'd be fun AND potentially directly useful for future job prospects. Heck, it'd even be good for my CURRENT job, since having a proper iPhone UI is on our list of big to-dos. Hmm, yep, that's what I'll do.