Bringing back the block

Started work on a new project today for a university and trying to keep things nice an simple. A lot of my designs of late have featured textures, gradients and shadows galroe, and while they do look nice, do tend to get a bit repetitive. Is refreshing to create buttons without a billion layer styles, and also means when I come to styling it up for the mock up there won't be a massive amount of CSS (or IE adaption).