Shaun's site certainly stirred up a lot of discussion during a quiet period on the Standards scene. Whether you love it or hate it, the menu system which is the crux of his new design definitely broke the mold.
It's this combination of innovative interface design, graphical expertise and technical nous that impressed our judges enough to give it an across the board thumbs up.
Reviewed by John Oxton :: Comments (33)
In the search for the new, the fashionable and the -- sometimes painfully -- distinct, it is all too easy to overlook the established. Besides, for my first review I was looking for a site that typifies my feelings about what constitutes good, solid, standards-based design. It seems almost inevitable that I was going to look to a well respected designer.
Roger's is not a design that tries to mug your senses when you first arrive and for that reason it is all too easy to take it for granted. Spend a little time there, though, and the attention to detail starts to reveal itself, from the perfectly executed combination of elastic and liquid layout techniques, the tight typography, all the way through to a navigation set that reacts in all the right ways. The unassuming nature of the design is also it's biggest success; whereas many sites begin to grate a little after numerous visits, 456 Berea Street simply settles down as a comfortable backdrop to the excellent content.
Given the nature of that content, Roger can be pretty certain who his audience is and it would have been all too easy for him to ignore certain browsers, or dismiss lower screen resolutions but he has done neither. The result is a site that practices what it preaches and a look under the hood reveals almost obsessively tidy CSS and XHTML served as application/xhtml+xml for those browsers that can cope.
How many of us can say we've achieved that on our personal sites?
Reviewed by John Oxton :: Comments (5)
I'd always associated feathered black and white images with bad wedding montages, but the designer of The Paumanok Review has used it perfectly to lay the setting for the fictional writing contained on this site.
The stark coldness of the scene -- paired with paper textures -- make it the perfect compliment to the prose and poetry that is the focus of this site and puts me in mind of the writings of some emigre Russian author.
Reviewed by Cameron Adams :: Comments (7)