So the inimitable (or not) Jason Kottke just redesigned his website. In his announcement post, he makes the following remark:

I mentioned false starts above. Late last year, I had an entire design that I'd been working on for almost 9 months (on and off) done in Photoshop, ready to be cut up and coded. It was boxy, had a tiled background, diagonal stripes, drop shadows, and lots of ornamental finishes. It was pretty, clean, lots of personality, a nice design all the way around. And if there's a dominant visual style (trend? fad?) right now, that's it (some fine examples here, here, here, and Lance beat it over the head here). I just didn't want to go there. So I went in a different direction, partially to avoid the crowd and partially to challenge myself. Do you know how hard it is to design text-heavy Web layouts that don't use boxes? Boxes are the lazy Web designer's best friend. ;) I felt bad enough relying on all the horizontal rules.

Great minds, I guess. The weird thing is that I missed this had happened until five minutes ago, which means that this weblog that I read fairly frequently anticipated tonight's little design epiphany by three days and I'm just now catching up. Wow, I feel like a slacker.

(Please do read that last sentence with all appropriate irony; what a sad commentary on the pride I take on being up-to-speed on large-scale adult geek clique gossip.)