Igbo style: Extra fresh, hold the mayo.
What tidbits did I learn this week? Well, for one: I need more time in the day and less procrastination. Part of me is struggling to keep up but at the same time I’m in this oxymoronic state of sadistically wanting more work than I can handle. I guess that’s what it’s like to be a designer, right? For the most part, this is a silly thing to say—what it means to be a designer is so multi-faceted and I can’t even begin to express how silly that seems. We are flirting with pretensions and humbleness on the regular, it seems.
…and now back to your feature-length, full-course, 5-dollar-off, supremely prepared, artisanal valued, multicoated, automatically sealed, vacuum-pressed blog post:
Source 1: Responsive CSS Zen Garden by Faith Evans (Behance)
What I think works well: The imagery and motion is fairly engaging and I believe that the responsiveness is a nice touch. The website’s usage of whitespace is somewhat engaging and the There’s excellent choices of vector imagery and a nice, simplistic sense of design Faith is doing here.
What I think doesn’t work well: This website is boring and filled with whitespace. I wish that there was more color somewhere or the colors were a bit more saturated. I’m also not really a fan of the choices of fonts here. I think the CSS ZEN GARDEN header should be a bit more south on the page. Although the white looks nice, what if it was an off-gray or contributing color to match the sky blue down below? Not saying it to be exactly sky blue, but like make it a pastel, this-is-the-pastel-color-that-my-late-grandmother-used-to-wear sort of color. That would be unique for sure.
Source 2: Deva: Cutler & Sharpener (httpster)
What I think works well: Ooooh goodness—the cream and greenish-blue color scheme is literally my kitchen. Because of that I just had to pick this (I’m kidding but it’s still fucking sick). I find this just has premium all about it, and that engages me. It’s got a good sense of story behind the image and hooks you in, as well as having some really sexy knives down below. Although I can’t account for the quality of the Damascus steel, I can say that the crafter who made these does an excellent job. See, this is because the website attracts me in and makes me want to keep reading. This is good web design.
What I think doesn’t work well: Although the website is pretty beautiful, I’ve seen this before. I think it’s got a lot of open space and no CTA on the top. The website also features the imagery in a rather plain way, which—although I think is nice—also makes it feel a bit jouvenile and detracts from their premium quality. The website takes a little longer to load sometimes depending on the page, but I think that can be fixed pretty easily. Overall though, very few changes. bon.
Overall, I believe that no (well, very few) web design is perfect. I want to be a cynic and say that they tend to all end up bottlenecking down the same damn template patterns, but I know that there’s so many other ways to do things. We still traditionally have that nav bar up there (I bet you just looked at medium’s nav bar as soon as you read that) and we still have a footer (you intentionally didn’t look down there because you knew I was going to call me out. Now you’re thinking “uhh well now I’m going to look.” Sure, sure—go ahead. It’s a bit bland, but there you have it).
That gave me a headache to write. I’ll see you next time!
Ta.
