It is just one of those crazy thoughts that leave as soon as you are out of the shower. But I digress.

“Honestly even with grids and blah blah, the square shape is getting truly boring!”

Will the next generation websites have a form of custom shapes? What if we want to create round shaped web pages? Of course it can be done even today….with lots of white space on the sides.

One reason why custom shapes do not work as well as traditional squares and rectangles is that the custom shapes still needs to be enveloped in a traditional cover. Greetings cards have always trodden on this path with having starfish and octopus-shaped cards, but in the end..alas..they had to be put in a boring rectangle envelope. Another very common example is that of CDs, DVDs and vinyl records (which by the way, are not extinct. Not yet!)

An ‘envelope’ in our sense would be a browser. If a browser window does not support the custom-shape by adapting to the shape of the webpage, it would be useless. That brings me to my next point.

One big evolutionary step the browsers will need to take, with this kind of changes in web design, will be ability shape-shift according to the web-page.  The browser toolbars, title bar and status bar – all these can either be in floating form or absent entirely.  Who uses them anyway, right?  I use my keyboard for most of my operations, and a lot of you would be, too.

So, what do you say?  Do you see web designs going this way in the future?  Feel free to leave your comments.  Let’s have a dialogue, and hopefully we WILL take web design in this direction.