Six Apart (Movable Type’s parent company) has redesigned their site. It looks pretty good, it degrades nicely, and nothing gives me a more overwhelming sensation of change than that new Livejournal section in the 6A top menu.

The drop-shadowed, fixed-width, “vertical layer floating over textured or solid background” effect seems very much in demand these days: Blogger, Powazek, StopDesign, Sidesh0w, just to name a few — and now Six Apart. Is it just me, or is every site redesign starting to look like Happy Cog?

In fact, the width of Six Apart’s main container div is exactly the same width as the Blogger Dashboard. Observe:

Update: It’s with some chagrin that I correct myself: Sidesh0w is not fixed width, and if I’d just bothered to wiggle my browser window a bit, I’d have seen it for myself. There’s a new CSS trick I need to master.