Dreamless.org

I've been visiting this bulletin board lately, called Dreamless [editor's note: Dreamless has been down for quite some time.]. The site is for web designers, and it has attracted them like moths to a flame.

For a design-centric board, it may not be what you would expect on first glance. The board is varying shades of grey, with little red buttons marking forums and threads with new posts since the last time you visited (ok, the cookies for this don't work right, so unless a thread or forum is closed, then the little red dots are always there). There are very few pictures. The site does not take forever to load. It is not what you typically expect from a design site. This is a good thing. The dark colours and low-banwidth pages help keep the tone mostly serious, and most of the discussions wind up being pretty meaningful.

Dreamless is the brainchild/headache of Joshua Davis, who's praystation.com [editor's note: Praystation has since been replaced by joshuadavis.com.] has been earning him praise from all sides, not to mention the fact that he works for the ultra-slick Kioken [editor's note: Kioken has shut its doors.].

When the board first started out, there were forums about solving specific design problems, and other stuff that might not be interesting to non-designers (actually, there's a lot that probably still wouldn't be interesting to people outside the design culture), but it also included forums run by other designers, which include topics that range from web-standards to drugs to video games. It is (almost) absolute chaos, which is exactly what it should be.