The Elusive Footer

Here’s a curious design oversight—something I’d like to call the elusive footer. You’ll find an example of one on 37signal’s Sortfolio site. Visit the site and you’ll quickly find that it’s very difficult to see the site’s footer. It exists, but whenever you scroll down, more portfolio results are loaded in the content area, pushing the footer out of the view.

Above you can see me momentarily catching the footer. In a second, the spinner on the right will finish loading and more results load up, hiding the footer once more. The same thing happens on the redesigned Google Image search pages: