Hey all, I've got a project to design the brochure, poster and website for a conference on the future of the internet.

I want to avoid the often sickening 'design gimmicks' usually associated with web design (drop shadows, plastic, web 2.0!) and have a design that is both attractive, relevant and simple.

I am toying with the idea of posing the limitation of using only 256 web-safe colours in my design, which will likely be mostly vector shapes. Any input on colour palette?

I am also thinking about using a monospaced typeface for certain parts of the hierarchy. Is this design suicide? Is this relevant to the subject matter?

Should I be trying to find a fresh monospaced font and pairing it with a nice typeface, or should I be looking into web-safe fonts that have less depth, but families like Lucida have both a sans and a monospaced face in the same family.

Any suggestions or critiques would be great, I'll post the actual work up here for critique once I get rolling on it, thanks in advance for your insight and suggestions!