April 2004 Winners
Wednesday April 28th, 2004
Skating is all about attitude -- living your life, committing to the move. And eS footwear's attitude goes down smoothly.
The layout of each page is well structured and defined, separating navigation from the cool tones of the content, which itself perfectly frames luscious product shots alongside vital stats. Visitors to the site come for glossy pictures, and that's what they get, along with some tight code and edgy design.
Some of the colour contrasts on the text could be upped a bit, but given the target market of the site, the defaults are serviceable.
Reviewed by Cameron Adams :: Comments (8)
Monday April 26th, 2004
My first impression of "GUI Galaxy":http://www.guigalaxy.com/ was "slick". The colour scheme is pleasing, the design is tight and I love the subtle detailing like the icons and nav bar. Also you've gotta love the robot illustrations. Like many other "design":http://www.pixelsurgeon.com/ "portal":http://www.designiskinky.net/index_main.html "sites":http://www.surfstation.lu/, "GUI Galaxy":http://www.guigalaxy.com makes liberal use of iFrames. This would usually be a huge turn off for me, however, considering this sites target audience (tech savvy designers) I'm willing to let my gut feeling about iFrames slide this one time. So on the whole, this beautifully designed standards based site is well deserving a silver star. Great Stuff.
Reviewed by Andy Budd :: Comments (13)
Friday April 23rd, 2004
It took a while to tabulate the votes, but they're in for the WSA April site of the month. In a closely fought contest, the weblog stylings of Alazanto just pipped Es Footwear's slick commercial feel. Maybe it's just our judges' bias against those skater punks who play their music too loud, but no doubt Kevin deserves the win.
More...
Reviewed by Cameron Adams :: Comments (34)
Tuesday April 20th, 2004
Mulligans is following in the footsteps of the aged Victorian feel that made whatdoiknow.org such an influential site. It's a very well branded site with Guinness-like creamy colors, wood carvings, decorative borders and unusually good header photos; all in all, a site that fits the subject perfectly.
It's also interesting to see that the developers Asset Web and Massimiliano Sorrentini have used a PNG graphic for the bar sign to make it seemlessly overlap the header graphic. We only wish that the PNG format was better supported by IE/Win, so we all could take advantage of the alpha transparency without resorting to workarounds.
Reviewed by Johan Edlund :: Comments (7)
Wednesday April 14th, 2004
I'm a really big fan of the whole Victoriana vibe going round at the moment. If "What Do I Know":http://whatdoiknow.org/ was one of the first to come to my attention, Cameron Moll's "Authentic Boredom":http://www.cameronmoll.com/, is one of the latest. The detailing is subtle, but intricate. The bright splashes of red help set off the subdued greys. A beautiful and exquisite site, well deserving of an award.
Reviewed by Andy Budd :: Comments (5)
Tuesday April 13th, 2004
The Icelandic language must be a designers dream. Just take a look at the beautiful headers for Radio Reykjavik. You'd be forgiven for thinking that “FORSÍÐA” (frontpage) is an image even though it's just plain old text. Very old text in fact:
“Resistance to change is one of the characteristics of the Icelandic language, which explains the fact that a twelfth-century text is still easy to read for a modern Icelander. However, Icelandic has undergone considerable change in its phonetics. Another characteristic of the language is its uniformity, i.e. absence of dialects.”
Source: NAT
Could this “resistance to change” be the reason for the spelling of “rokk'n'roll”? Not even Lemmy of Motörhead could come up with such a great spelling!
Radio Reykjavik is developed by Andri Sigurðsson and his own personal portfolio is another great site.
Reviewed by Johan Edlund :: Comments (5)
Friday April 9th, 2004
"What Do I know" is the beautiful personal site of designer Todd Dominey. Todd's site was one of the first CSS sites I came across that really inspired me. The design is clean, simple and understated. The typographic elements combine with the layout and colour scheme to invoke — in my mind — the image of an elegant, Victorian era periodical. This site is about great content, and the design and typography do everything in their power to make reading this site a joy.
Reviewed by Andy Budd :: Comments (18)
Friday April 9th, 2004
I'm not in the habit of awarding weblogs, but I couldn't pass this one up. Recently re-designed, Sam Royama's weblog on design is beautifully rendered.
Great header images, menu elements, those lovely tabs and even style switching give the site real visual impact; a style all its own. This is on top of the great content that Sam also puts up.
A couple of tips: the code could be a bit more semantic, and anchor tags should be separated by more than whitespace.
Reviewed by Cameron Adams :: Comments (3)
Tuesday April 6th, 2004
It's easy to forget that a powerful design doesn't have to be chock full o' graphics. Twinsparc lives up to their own credo of "Smart Design for Print and Web" by taking full advantage of web standards, simplicity and extensive use of white space.
Worth noticing: the 800 pixel high center column forces a scrollbar to appear for all pages. This effectively stops the content from "jumping" horizontally and provides a "frames-like" experience where only the content appears to be refreshed when viewed in a browser that auto-hides the scrollbars. Smart.
If you ever submitted a site to WSA you'd know that our own technique of forcing a vertical scrollbar is slightly more radical. :)
Reviewed by Johan Edlund :: Comments (6)
Saturday April 3rd, 2004
A controversial choice, I know, but Jeffrey Zeldman et al's latest effort is a nice, smooth piece of design. Straying away from his trademark orange, the site features nice cream and brown tones, inspired (so Zeldman says) by non-dairy creamers.
Although a prominent figure in the Web design community, I can't say that I've seen much of Zeldman's work (outside of ALA, etc.), but this site reassures me that his design and usability skills are up there. (although accessibility might be an issue: no skip navigation links?)
Reviewed by Cameron Adams :: Comments (12)